


Sparrow

by Emily Irish (sparrowws)



Series: Sparrowverse [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Hydra, I'm Bad At Tagging, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Road Trip, friends are good, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-05-17 15:13:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5875708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparrowws/pseuds/Emily%20Irish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Imogen Haylock has been lied to her whole life. Clint Barton is determined to set her straight. After all, he always did have a soft spot for kids like her, no matter where their loyalties lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Mission

**Author's Note:**

> Crossposted to FF.net

“Haylock!”

Hearing her name, Imogen stopped in her tracks and turned warily to face the three other junior agents that had been following her since she left the mess hall ten minutes ago. The one that had called her name, Eliot Walters, was the first to reach her, stopping just short of her fists with a smug grin that she itched to wipe off his face. His followers, Burchett and McCarthy, stayed back, trying to look tough and impressive (it was all an act though – she’d beaten them before, and she could beat them again).

“What do you want, Eliot?” she asked, crossing her arms to avoid doing something she’d regret.

He shrugged. “Just wanted to tell you what a nice job you did in training today. Twenty missed shots – gotta be a record for wasted bullets or something.” He glanced back at his friends, laughing along with them.

“Better than the money your mother wasted putting you through school,” she shot back. “It was fourteen, not twenty. How’d you ever get into SHIELD when you can’t even count properly?”

He stopped laughing. “At least I got parents,” he spat. “I hear you needed a sympathy vote from your brother to get into training.”

Her hands curled into fists. She’d been strictly told, there would be no more fighting, but the urge to punch him was a strong one. They were just so good at riling her up – Eliot in particular – and from the moment she’d gotten here, the other recruits had all disliked her. She had that effect on people. She’d been barely scraping by for _weeks_ now; SHIELD was the only thing she had, and she’d be damned if she was going to let some good-for-nothing kids take it away from her.

With that in mind, she turned her back on them and tried to walk away.

Eliot, ever the idiot, grabbed her shoulder, stopping her from escaping. “Aw, Haylock, come on. We’re just playing around. We’re all friends, aren’t we?”

Her hands curled into fists. She’d been strictly told, there would be no more fighting, but the urge to punch him was a strong one. They were just so good at riling her up – Eliot in particular – and they always forgot that she wasn’t afraid of starting a fight. It was because they always underestimated her, because she was small and blonde and cursed with a soft face that made her scowl look more like a pout, right up until her fists started flying. Then they would remember…and then one or both of them would end up in Medical and she’d take the blame for it again. She’d been barely scraping by for weeks now; SHIELD was the only thing she had, and she’d be damned if she was going to let some good-for-nothing kids take it away from her.

“Haylock!” a new voice called, and all her satisfaction turned to dread.

The deep, commanding voice of her handler rang through the cold hallway as he rounded the same corner the boys had come around just moments before, face as dark as a thunderstorm. His steps echoed with his voice, heavy and confident, carrying him to the scene of the crime in mere seconds.

“What’s up, chief?” she asked bravely as he reached them, eyes as cold and hard as the concrete walls around them.

“Don’t play around, Haylock,” Donoghue growled in response, towering over her and giving her a murderous look that would have any other agent trembling in their boots. “What have I told you about starting fights?”

“He was asking for it.”

He shook his head. “When you’re involved, no one is asking for it.”

They stood there, eye to eye, and stared each other down as Eliot limped past them, arms thrown over the shoulders of the other boys. “You’ll pay for this,” he spat at her as they passed. She spared him a look of absolute contempt, but did not deign to answer.

“Imogen,” the handler said, once the hall was empty. “You’re off training.”

She stared at him for a moment, stunned into silence. The anger returned within seconds, rushing through her until she was itching to hit something again. “You can’t do that!” she protested loudly. “I’ve barely done anything wrong! You can’t kick me out for teaching some stupid kid a lesson!”

‘That ‘stupid kid’ will be missing out on his first mission because of you!” Donoghue thundered. “And he’s the third one you’ve injured this week _alone_! Three young agents, all more promising than you, out of action for several weeks because you couldn’t keep your temper.”

“It’s not that bad,” she replied sullenly. “They could have just as easily been injured in training.”

The handler stopped for a moment, taking a deep breath to calm himself. His face was beet red, like a cartoon character who was about to explode. “I want you to leave,” he said finally. “You’re out of control, and until you learn to stop throwing punches and work with your team, I don’t want to see you anywhere near them.” She opened her mouth to argue, but he cut her off before she could even begin with a sharp, “Quiet!” Her mouth snapped closed again, and silence fell over them.

“It’s not just that, Imogen,” he continued, when he was sure she wasn’t going to interrupt. “You’re at the bottom of every kind of training we’re giving you, and I can’t see you making any reasonable effort to improve your scores in the future. I let you into this team because I knew you struggled at the Academy, and I thought you might do better in a less structured environment, but it’s been almost a year now and I’ve seen no improvement in your attitude at all.”

“I didn’t need your pity vote,” she spat pettily. “If you didn’t want me here, you shouldn’t have asked for me.”

“I didn’t include you in my team out of pity. And I didn’t expect you to behave like this when given this sort of opportunity.” He dragged a hand down his face, more tired than angry now. “I want you off base by dusk. Go to another base, a safe house, a hotel down the road, I don’t care; just get out of my sight and stay out of it until I tell you otherwise.”

Her mouth snapped shut. She’d heard of agents being discharged, or retiring, or being thrown in the brig for disobedience, but never _banned from their base_. Granted, most agents had been on missions and had identities that would be at risk if they were just thrown out into the world without any warning or protection. She was a nobody, on or off base, civilian or otherwise. And her only enemies, funnily enough, were the ones she’d made inside SHIELD.

She stumbled back two steps, waiting for him to call her back and tell her more things she didn’t want to hear. When he remained silent she turned and fled as fast as she could, back towards the bunks where the junior agents she hadn’t put in the infirmary recently were probably waiting to watch her pack. Maybe she’d put them all there before she left, just to prove her point.

She barely even made it into the next hallway before her phone went off, stopping her dead in her tracks. Half hoping it was her brother, back from whatever mission he’d been on the last couple of days, she dug it out of her pocket and unlocked it, glancing down at the text that had just come through.

It wasn’t Will. Instead, it was from some sort of private number that didn’t look like it belonged anywhere near the USA. It was composed of only two words:

 _HAIL HYDRA_.

The alarm went off as she read it, the base plunging into darkness for a second before red strips of emergency lighting kicked in. Her heart leapt into her throat at the sudden change in environment – suddenly, the utilitarian concrete walls seemed much more imposing. Shoving her phone back in her pocket, she tried to plan – if this was happening, if HYDRA were here and taking the base (which was likely, considering the loss of power and the loud alarm making her ears ring), there would be bloodshed, and it would reach her soon. She could go to her sleeping quarters, which weren’t far but were probably full of junior agents that may or may not be on her side. Or, she could try to escape, though she was a long way from any doors that led above ground. The armoury was out of the question too; over the other side of the base, closer to mission control which was undoubted where the fighting would start. If she wanted a weapon, she was going to have to take one from someone else.

A startled cry from behind her turned her back the way she came. Donoghue, she remembered suddenly; he was still close by, and alone, and as one of the commanding officers of the base was probably armed. But which side was he on?

Unable to help herself, she crept slowly back towards Donoghue, pressing her back to the wall at the corner and turning just enough to see around. The handler was there, fighting hand to hand with an agent Imogen had seen around but didn’t know the name of. His previously spotless suit was stained with blood, just like the knife in his hand, and one man already lay lifeless on the floor, blood pooling around him. As she watched, Donoghue ducked under the man’s fists, kicked his leg out from under him and buried the knife in his throat, all in one smooth movement. Choking loudly, his opponent fell to the ground. Donoghue staggered backwards, knife still clutched in his hand.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she flattened herself against the wall again, willing herself to breathe, to move before he caught her and killed her too. She pushed off the wall just as Donoghue rounded the corner, limping and clutching a gaping wound in his shoulder.

“Haylock?” he asked with wide eyes, reaching out towards her with the hand that had previously been holding his shoulder together. She took a step backwards, far out of his reach. “No, no girl,” he wheezed, from lungs that weren’t quite drawing in the air he needed. “I’m not going to hurt you. Come here.”

“What, like you didn’t hurt them?” she asked, pointing back towards the men he’d just killed.

He shook his head. “They’re HYDRA agents,” he explained. “You know SHIELD history?” She nodded dumbly, and he stumbled forwards to pat her on the shoulder. “Knew you knew something, Haylock. No time for that now. Have you got a weapon?”

“No,” she told him, her voice shaking.

The hand on her shoulder slipped down to her wrist, raising it, and before she knew it, he was pressing the handle of his knife into her palm, and wrapping her fingers around it. “You take this one,” he said firmly, letting her hand go. His fingers left a trail of blood on hers. “You run now,” he continued, leaning down a little to look her straight in the eye. His hand landed heavily on her shoulder again. “You’ve got guts, kid. Take that, and get out of here, and you keep running until they can’t find you.”

“But I can stay,” she protested. “I can fight. I’ve beaten these guys before.”

“That’s an _order_ , Haylock,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. She heard what he had heard a moment later; footsteps, lots of them, echoing down the hallway. “Just for once in your life, do what I tell you.”

The owners of the footsteps rounded the corner, all five of them, fully armed and dressed for a fight. Donoghue turned to face them, shoving her behind him. Five rifles focused their sights on him.

“What side are you on?” their leader demanded, shouting over the alarm. “What side?”

“I think you know what side I’m on,” Donoghue replied darkly. “You HYDRA scumbags.”

Her mind moved fast. These were HYDRA soldiers. Donoghue had openly sided with SHIELD, and while she was with him they would assume she was too. They might not even give her a chance to decide for herself. She was far outnumbered in this fight, even she could see that; five of them with guns, and all she had was one little knife.

Panicking, she did the one thing she knew she could do. She stepped to the side, pulled Donoghue around to face her, and stuck the knife right where she knew his heart would be.

For several seconds, they both seemed to freeze. Stuttering, his hand clutched at hers on the handle of the knife, and his eyes stared at her with the same, wild expression he’d had when he’d first come around the corner. Time slowed down as she watched him slip to the ground, pulling the knife out himself as he went. By the time his head hit the concrete, he was unconscious or dead or close to both, and she was left standing there, his blood painting her hands.

“Which side?” someone asked to her left, and the world sped up again as the warm barrel of his gun pressed against her temple.

“HYDRA,” she replied, dropping the knife. It clattered loudly to the floor at her feet. “Hail HYDRA!”

“Wait,” another voice said, further away than the one with a gun pressed to her head. “Wait! That’s the Haylock girl. Will’s sister. I know her.”

“You going to vouch for her, Sanchez?” the first one asked. His gun did not relax.

“Yeah,” the second voice said slowly. “Yeah, she’s good. Her brother’s a good agent. Parents were too. We can trust her.”

Finally, the gun moved away and the guy stepped back to get a good look at her. She turned to face him, unable to look at Donoghue anymore. “You’re here on training, aren’t you?” he asked. “Part of Donoghue’s little project group from the Academy.”

“What’s it to you?” she managed to spit out, sounding a lot braver than she felt.

His head tilted to one side, considering something. “Aren’t you the one who’s been sending all those kids to medical?”

She shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “Does that matter?”

He shrugged. “Maybe not to some people. But I heard you sent my little brother there yesterday morning.”

“Adrian,” Sanchez interrupted. “This is not the time. We’re supposed to be cleaning out the base, remember?”

He stepped backwards, and suddenly Imogen felt like she had room to breathe properly. “We’ll circle back to it,” he told her with a smile that would be more in place on a crocodile. “You get yourself somewhere safe, _Haylock_.” They filed past her, only Sanchez giving her a smile as they did. Suddenly, she was alone in the hallway with Donoghue, staring glassy-eyed at her boots.

She tried not to look at him as she picked up the knife and retreated towards the bunks.

 ----------

A few hours later, as what would usually be dinner time approached, there was a knock on the door to her quarters – now completely hers, with the removal of the seven other junior agents she had previously shared with. There was a large blood stain on the wall she was trying not to think about.

Imogen opened the door to find a nervous-looking young agent standing in the hallway beyond, shuffling his feet nervously. “What?” she asked in no uncertain terms, ready to shut the door in his face if he took too long in answering.

He seemed to sense this, swallowing hard and scrambling for his given message. “Agent Rockwell would like to see you in mission control,” he said hurriedly.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she replied, and with a tight nod, the boy turned and scurried away as fast as his short legs could carry him. She watched him go, wondering what on earth had made SHIELD – or even HYDRA – choose him for service, then grabbed a jacket and followed him, grimacing at the SHIELD logo on her shoulder. She’d have to get rid of the jacket, she supposed, even though it was by far her favourite.

There were several people waiting for her at mission control, though only one was of immediate interest to her. Agent Rockwell was standing at the head of the room, watching over the few tech crew that remained, and turned to her as she approached. She recognised him as soon as she saw his face – the guy that had held a gun to her head earlier, of course, because her run of bad luck today wasn’t quite over.

“Haylock,” he said warmly, turning to greet her. His eyes were cold as stones. “So nice of you to join us. Presumably you’re enjoying having all the bunks to yourself, seeing as you’ve disposed of every other agent that might have slept there?”

“Your men killed the others,” she pointed out bluntly, deciding that she didn’t like this man any more than she liked his brother.

He waved it away. “I don’t need to know the details. What I do need to know-” He paused to step down from the small platform at the front of the room, to her level. “-is how loyal you are to HYDRA’s noble cause.”

She steeled herself and looked him dead in the eye, refusing to waver. To look away, to stutter or stumble, would be to let him win, and she’d be damned if she’d let _Eliot_ ’s brother beat her, even if her heart did skip nervously at the thought that he might be about to kill her. He certainly hadn’t hesitated during the bloodletting earlier in the day – nor had he bothered to clean up, leaving the blood to dry in dark stains on the concrete around the base.

“Just as loyal as you are,” she replied, throwing the challenge back to him.

He laughed, undaunted. “I doubt that,” he mocked, glancing at the armed men about the room, who smirked their response. “Our orders were to wipe out every part of SHIELD as quickly and efficiently as we can. How many of their scum did you kill?”

“One,” she claimed boldly, though an icy hand clutched at her throat at the memory of Donoghue’s wide eyes, in the seconds before he died. Try as she might, they would not leave her mind.

“ _One,_ ” he scoffed, and there was a murmur of laughter from around the room. “If we left the job to you, it would never be done. And don’t think I don’t know about you and the rest of your troop – Sanchez here saw you cowering around the corner when he went to finish them off.”

Scowling, her eyes found Sanchez, standing back in the shadows. His face was blank – the only one not jeering and laughing at her. He’d vouched for her, she remembered, when she’d killed Donoghue. He knew her brother. “I wasn’t cowering,” she claimed angrily, tearing her eyes away from her betrayer and back to Rockwell. “I would have finished them, if your man hadn’t beaten me to it.”

Rockwell sobered quickly. “You’ll be glad of a chance to prove yourself properly, then, I presume.”

Imogen forced herself to shrug nonchalantly. “I’ll do whatever HYDRA need me to do.” Her voice wavered on the last few words and inwardly, she berated herself for her lack of courage. Now that her anger had faded, anxiety had taken over; what would he have her do, when his brother’s bruises were so fresh in his mind? He would be looking for retribution, surely – HYDRA was not the place to make enemies, not if you wanted to stay alive long. Not that she’d ever heeded that warning, kept safe by the comforts of SHIELD regulations. HYDRA was not so soft an organisation.

“No,” Rockwell decided. “You’ll do more than that.” He turned, and gestured to one of the tech guys behind him, who rose to hand him a plain brown file. “Here’s your first mission. Congratulations on becoming a proper agent of something.”

She opened the file, and scanned the first page. “Clint Barton?” she read, frowning. She’d heard the name before somewhere, but she couldn’t remember _where_. It mustn’t have seemed important to her at the time. Whether or not she knew who he was though, the list of successful missions on the next page was extensive and highly impressive – whoever he was, it was no wonder HYDRA wanted him dead.

“You want me to kill a guy with over thirty highly classified missions next to his name?” she asked in disbelief. That he would even think of sending a junior agent, fresh picked from the Academy, was sheer madness. But then she remembered what she’d done to his brother, and saw the petty smirk on his face, and it didn’t seem so ridiculous after all.

“You doubt the sense of a HYDRA commander?” he replied, taunting her. “If you want to refuse, I’ll be happy to report you as a deserter, and send someone else in your place. Though surely you wouldn’t refuse, when you claim you’re so loyal to the cause.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine what HYDRA would do to deserters. Another lesson drilled into her, but this was a warning she had heeded. “I’ll do it,” she said bullishly, and tried to ignore the victorious smile that spread across his vile face.

“His location is in your briefing,” Rockwell informed her, gesturing towards the folder in her hands. “Some old SHIELD safe house, I’m told. You might want to hurry – a snake like that won’t stay in one place forever.” He turned away, wandering back towards the head of the room, and she realised that that was all she was going to get. No backup, no extraction, no weapon. Just a few sheets of paper and the jeering eyes of his soldiers as she left the room.

 ----------

In the end, they did give her one thing to help her on her mission – a cyanide pill, stuck firmly to a tooth in the back of her mouth just in case Barton captured and decided to torture her for information. The real reason for it, she thought privately, was probably Rockwell hoping that she would accidentally break it and kill herself for him. That would make a very neat solution for all his problems.

The address in her briefing led her to a large family home on the outskirts of a sleepy town, several hours away from her base. It was entering the early hours of the morning when she finally stopped the car she’d borrowed from the base several streets away, parking innocuously on the side of the road. The sedan was all black and blended in without a second thought with the other cars sitting in neat rows outside houses on in driveways, but still, she’d rather walk the couple of blocks to get to the safe house than leave it any closer and risking Barton recognising it for what it was – a SHIELD car, so well designed to blend in that to the right eyes, it stood out like a sore thumb.

It was cold outside, she discovered as she climbed from the car and a biting wind snapped at her face and hands. Dark, too, the moon and stars obscured by heavy clouds overhead, and the streetlights of this quiet suburban area placed just a little too far apart for the pools of light to reach. The street between them, the one that would lead her to Barton, wasn’t even lit at all, as no houses faced onto it until much further down. Someone had arranged this town in a perfect grid, it seemed, for she hadn’t seen a flower or road marker out of place on the streets she’d driven down. It would have been eerie, except that she wasn’t easily spooked by things that went bump in the night, or neighbourhoods filled with obsessively neat people.

Shivering, she pulled her bag from the passenger seat and pushed the door shut as quietly as she could, locking the car after her. She ditched the key in the nearest flowerbed as she passed, hauling her bag over one shoulder. It wasn’t very full, containing just the few clothes she had decided she would need before she got around to killing this guy, the gun and knife and a few other useful items she’d secreted away from the base when no one was looking too closely at the storage room, and a toothbrush, the only other thing she owned that she cared enough to bring with her. She wasn’t particularly attached to any of her possessions, given that most of them had come from SHIELD or her brother and were of practical use rather than sentimental. There was nothing left of her parents for her to carry around, and her brother, Will, was with her more through her phone than any silly gift, and there wasn’t much that would kill him.

She’d texted him earlier, to assure him that she was alive and to reassure herself that he was alive too. He was overseas somewhere now, finishing up a job, but he had told her that not only had he survived, but that he would be returning within the week to save her from Rockwell’s petty disagreements with her. She hadn’t told him about the mission. If he knew, he’d probably jump straight on a quinjet and come to do it for her, and then she would lose the opportunity to rub her victory in Rockwell’s smug face.

Barton couldn’t be _that_ lethal, she’d managed to convince herself on the way there. As she walked, she ran the argument through her head again. HYDRA may be cruel and ruthless (as is everything that rose to the top of the food chain, Will would say), but they were smart too, and they would not waste valuable loyal agents so soon chasing high-profile targets that would only kill them and avoid capture. Even Rockwell, though he was dumb, couldn’t possibly be that petty – he knew the blow would have crippled SHIELD but not eliminated them, and that they would need every man and woman in the following months to finish the job. She was difficult and unexperienced, but she was still a fighter, still useful – and everyone knew there would be hell to pay if her brother found out she’d been sent to her death on purpose.

Not that her plan involved dying. She’d decided she would wait a day or two, and beg shelter and pretend to be on his side. If it was a safe house, as Rockwell had suggested, then it would have been known to a few SHIELD agents, and it would be easy to pretend that she was one of those few. If he trusted her, he would turn his back, and if he turned his back, it would be easier for her to kill him without having to fight him.

And if he decided to leave before she could make him trust her? Well, she’d have to improvise. She wasn’t that good at planning.

The house stood right in the middle of one of the dark spots between streetlights, with nothing to give any sign of it being occupied. Heavy black-out curtains were drawn tight over the windows, the garden was neat but unattended, several wilting flowers just visible in the dark of night, and the door, when she tried it, was locked. For all appearances, it looked like it had been locked up for some time, like perhaps its owner had gone on a long vacation and forgotten to ask someone to mind the front yard while they were gone. Who cut the grass and kept the flowers from dying off properly, she wondered as she dug through her bag for the set of lock picks she’d filched from a dead boy’s drawers in her room. Dylan, she recalled. He’d thought having them would make him cool, and it had worked for about five minutes, until the others had realised he didn’t actually know how to use them. Dylan hadn’t much skill for lock picking.

She’d never told Dylan, or any of the others who had struggled to figure the picks out, that she had a particular inclination for the art of lock picking. You wouldn’t know it, if you knew her, since picking locks required patience and discipline that she usually lacked, but it was the one thing she could sit still to do, even if it took her over half an hour, as she realised this one was going to. The lock on this door was as complex as the ones on the doors at the Academy, where she’d practised her craft with a diligence that had escaped her during her actual lessons. It was a sort of deadbolt and normal lock all in one, and occasionally was combined with an alarm system, or a small explosion with enough power behind it to blast your hands clean off. Neither of those security measures were attached to this lock, thankfully, but still she found herself having to grit her teeth and hold her hands steady in the cold as she teased the tumblers into place.

Finally, what felt like hours later, the final piece moved aside and the lock clicked softly as it disengaged. She was too cold to feel relief, teeth chattering and whole body shivering, and she packed the lock picks away in record time, shoving the whole box carelessly into her bag. The doorhandle turned quietly enough, but the door itself creaked loud enough to wake the dead as she opened it, making her freeze and wait for someone to pounce at her. Surely, whoever was in the house would know she was here now, if they hadn’t heard her picking at the lock. Nothing came for her though, nothing but the warm light coming from the first room on the left, which spilled over the doorframe to entice her inside.

She stepped through the doorway slowly, leaving the door open behind her in case she needed a quick exit. There was no way any decent SHIELD agent wouldn’t have heard it creak. It was warm inside the house, a welcome relief from the freezing night air just outside, and dark except for two lights – the one to the left, and another in a kitchen at the end of the hall. It was quiet too, only the low muttering of a TV breaking the silence. That was where her mark was, she guessed, though he couldn’t be much of an agent if he could be caught watching TV.

Softly, she dropped her backpack to the ground and crept towards the living room, peeking around the corner. She only caught a glimpse of the face of her mark before jerking away from the doorway, a knife spinning through the air just centimetres from her face. Flattening herself against the wall, she took a deep breath in an attempt to calm her racing heart and then gathered herself, shifting away from the door and back towards her bag for the knife she’d stowed in a side pocket. The gun was towards the bottom of the bag, harder to reach – she didn’t want to appear well armed, and she wasn’t so good at shooting anyway. Not that the knife would help her, if the knife stuck firmly in the wall across from her was any indication of this guy’s skill with ranged weapons.

She couldn’t really afford to fight him, Imogen was slowly beginning to realise. She’d already knew that, but still, here she was armed with one knife and a significant amount of stupidity. Her plan had been to just walk in and befriend him? He was an agent on the run from an organisation he’d worked for a few hours ago, and was currently being pursued by numerous people trying to kill him. And even if he wasn’t, she wasn’t any good at making friends.

She took another deep breath, steeling herself. “Hello?” she called experimentally, back pressed firmly to the wall again. There was silence; then, the groan of a couch and the shuffling of feet across the worn carpet. A moment later, a man appeared in the gloomy hallway, several years her senior but no doubt just as capable as any younger agent. Fierce, storm-grey eyes met hers, testing her, and she glared right back with just the right amount of hostility.

“Who are you?” he demanded after a moment. There was a gun in his hand, but he didn’t raise it, just fixed his eyes on her and waited for an answer.

“Imogen,” she blurted out, and then collected herself. “Imogen Haylock. SHIELD Agent.”

“SHIELD?” The gun in his hand twitched. “Dangerous name to be throwing around right now.”

She shrugged, but the movement felt stiff and false. “Could be more dangerous to say HYDRA.”

“Depends which side you’re on.” He eyed her speculatively, and she squirmed under his gaze. “How do I know you’re not HYDRA coming to kill me? How do you know _I’m_ not HYDRA, waiting to kill _you_?”

Imogen wanted to roll her eyes. “If you want to think like that, we’ll be here all day. I don’t have time for that.”

“Well, I’m not HYDRA,” he informed her stiffly. “I’m gonna need more proof that you aren’t though.”

“I thought this was a safe house for everyone,” she protested half-hearted.

“I was here first,” he replied. “My safe house, my rules. Proof of being a good guy, please.”

“Here, then.” She crouched down slowly next to her bag, one eye tracking the gun in his hand as she rummaged through it for her old SHIELD badge. Her hand closed around the edge of the leather case and she pulled it out, offering it to him.

He took it and flipped the case open, studying it for a second. “This has no meaning anymore,” he said bitterly, tossing it back.

“Would I have kept it, if I was with HYDRA?” she challenged. “I think ritual badge burning might be one of their first orders of business; and it would be pretty suspicious for a HYDRA agent to be walking around with a SHIELD badge still on them.”

He mulled it over, eyes staring over her head to the open doorway behind her, searching the night for something. “You’re kind of young,” he said eventually. “For a SHIELD agent.”

“You’re kind of old,” she shot back.

A playful light lit up his eyes. “More experienced, don’t you mean?”

Her response was flat. “I mean what I say.”

He laughed, and the sound was so unexpected that it made her jump a little. “Alright kid, you can stay. Only one night though.” He jerked his thumb towards the hall. “Rooms are that way.”

“I’m not a kid,” she grumbled, shouldering her bag and pushing past him. One eye remained on the gun in his hand until she was past, and then she was forced to turn her back and hope he wouldn’t shoot her then and there. No gunshots rang through the hall though, just the shuffling of his feet again and the creaking of the door as he shut and locked it behind her.

Inexplicably, she found herself _smiling_ as she walked away, though she hadn’t meant to. It had been a while since she’d gone toe-to-toe with someone and walked away unscathed – or without scathing them.

The smile faded as she realised that soon, she’d have to kill him.


	2. Kill

Imogen woke to the smell of bacon frying, the hissing and sputtering filtering through the wall between her and the kitchen, accompanied by the quiet murmur of a TV. Groaning, she rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, not ready to face the day or the man she was supposed to…well. She truly had no idea what she was going to do once she did get up – he’d made it clear last night that he’d want her gone this morning, unless she could convince him to let her stay longer. She wasn’t ready to face him yet, and she wasn’t going to be ready in the twenty or so minutes it would take to haul herself out of bed and dress for the day, so her options were limited to leaving, or convincing him to let her stay.

Not that leaving was really an option. Even if her pride would let her run away, HYDRA certainly wouldn’t, and while she could take on Eliot Rockwell without a second thought, his brother was a lot more powerful than him (though she would never admit to being _afraid_ of him).

The scent of breakfast cooking persisted, until she could stand it no longer and forced herself to rise, dressing as slowly as she could. Her stomach growling, she chased the promise of bacon and coffee out into the kitchen, sliding into a seat along the breakfast bar. Clint stood on the other side, gulping down coffee straight from the pot. “Morning kid,” he grunted between mouthfuls, sliding a plate of bacon and eggs across the bench.

“Not a kid,” she reminded him, eyeing the almost-empty coffee pot in his hands and wondering how much of it he had already drunk. He didn’t look ashamed.

“Whatever.” He emptied the last dregs of coffee into the sink and started to make another pot. “Want some coffee?”

“No thanks,” she replied, scooping up some of the egg on her plate. “I wouldn’t want to deprive you.”

He turned sharply to stare at her, affronted. “Are you saying I drink too much coffee?”

She eyed him speculatively, chewing her eggs slowly. “No?” she replied unconvincingly, mouth still half full. He huffed an unhappy sigh and turned back to his coffee, and she stifled the urge to laugh, filling her mouth again before she could make a sound. Her phone went off in her pocket a moment later, distracting her before she could torment him further.

It was her brother, Will, she realised as she pulled it out and opened her messages. _Who’s your mark?_ the message read. He’d caught wind of her being on a mission then, probably from Sanchez or one of his other friends who happened to be at the same base as her. Will had a lot of friends about the place, HYDRA or otherwise, and he’d always used them to keep an eye on her no matter where she was sent. Sometimes, she thought all her problems would be solved if she just had his talent for making people like him.

“You know, you never told me your name,” she directed at Clint suddenly, ignoring the message and sliding her phone back into her pocket. “Or what you do – _did_ – in SHIELD.”

He turned again and leant back against the bench, jaw tightening. She could see his mind turning through his options – for all he was playing the fool, he was as sharp as a whistle underneath that façade. “Name’s Clint,” he said finally, slowly, like he still wasn’t convinced this was information he should be giving out.

“That’s it?” she pressed. “Just Clint?”

He nodded. “That’s all you need to know.”

“Right.”

In the heavy silence that followed, Imogen found herself having to turn away from his uncomfortable gaze, focusing instead on the TV nearby. A morning talk show was playing, the sort of show she usually abhorred watching, in the middle of discussing an attack on the Triskelion in DC; a SHIELD building, she realised with a jolt. The HYDRA takeover had not been swift or secret at all then, if it was on daytime TV already. The footage shown was just as jarring as the topic, snippets of ground coverage of three enormous helicarriers firing on each other and then falling into the Potomac playing across the screen. She’d missed all of this happening the day before, with everything else that had been going on, and it was startling to see that perhaps everything had not gone as smoothly as Rockwell thought it had.

Watching the different headlines flicker across the screen, she realised that not only had SHIELD all but fallen, HYDRA had been torn apart too. Captain America, the source of all of HYDRA’s problems, was presumed dead for all his heroics, and the Black Widow and the rest of the Avengers were on their way to Capitol Hill to explain why every piece of intelligence concerning the national security of multiple countries had been dumped onto the internet for anyone to read.

“Sucks about the Triskelion, huh,” Clint said, following her gaze to the screen.

“I didn’t even know,” Imogen replied faintly, only half registering his words. A thought came to her a moment later, and she frowned. “What happened to the other Avengers? They’re only talking about Captain America.”

Clint glanced up at the TV again. “Had their own problems to deal with, I guess,” he said with a hint of what looked like amusement in his eyes. “Less public problems.”

“Lucky for HYDRA, I guess,” she said, careful to keep her tone neutral. Her phone went off again, and she pulled it out. _This is important, Imogen._ Will again. She stuffed it back in her pocket, resolving to ignore him. She could do this on her own.

When she turned back to the TV, Clint was watching her again.

“What?” she asked a little aggressively, sick of ignoring him.

He shrugged. “You look too young to be in this business,” he admitted.

“I’m twenty one,” she shot back. “That’s old enough.”

“That’s still pretty young.”

“Yeah well, I’m good at what I do,” she lied through her teeth, picking up her fork again before he could call her out. She wasn’t a particularly good liar.

She could feel his suspicious gaze without even having to look up. “What clearance level are you?” he asked.

“Three,” she replied, and shoved bacon in her mouth before she could break. None, was the real answer. Technically she wasn’t even an agent, still classified as an Academy student. Her phone buzzed again, muffled by her pocket. She ignored it completely.

“Get out in the field much?” he pressed, and she felt like she was being tested.

“No,” she replied stiffly. “I’m mostly on extraction.” Another text came through. “I guess you want me to leave soon,” she hurried to add, before he could ask her more questions about her fake job.

Clint nodded reluctantly, and she wondered if he was reconsidering. “It’s for the best,” he pointed out. “Safer for you. And for me. Sorry, kid.”

“I get it,” she replied, eyes turning back down to her breakfast. “I was thinking maybe I could stay until it gets dark? I’d rather travel at night than in broad daylight.”

He sighed heavily. “Alright. But no longer than that. You can’t stay here.” His voice was firm and brokered no argument.

“Yes sir,” she muttered, rolling her eyes and standing up to scrape what remained of her breakfast into the bin.

 ----------

There was a gun on the coffee table.

It had been there all day, sitting there mocking her. Imogen wasn’t sure _why_ there was a gun on the coffee table, but she assumed it had something to do with Clint. He was far from the most organised person she’d ever met. If she hadn’t seen his kill list – which happened to be three pages long, and that was just the stuff _SHIELD_ had sent him on – she might have called him scatterbrained. Except no one with that kind of record could live long just by making it up as they go along.

It had occurred to her sometime throughout the day that his record should have been enough to convince her to drop this whole mission and let someone else go through with it, but the thought of going back to Rockwell without having completed it had put a nasty knot in her stomach that wouldn’t go away. And Will calling her earlier to try to talk her out of it had only hardened her resolve. He should know better than anyone she doesn’t like being told what she should or should not do. Besides, running away now would be stupid, when she had earnt Barton’s trust (he may not trust her much further than he could throw her, but he did trust her). No one would get a better opportunity than her, now.

She was ignoring the part where she was supposed to kill him. If she didn’t think about it, she could ignore the memory of Donoghue’s last moments and do what she had to do. It was easy, really; take the gun, point, and shoot. She’d practised it enough times in her life.

The knot tightened.

Steeling herself, she picked up the gun. It was already loaded, a comfortable weight that fit perfectly in her hand. She’d trained for _years_ for this, but now her hands shook as she flicked the safety and rose from the couch, her finger settling on the trigger. Clint’s voice travelled down the hall from the kitchen, and as she crept closer it became clear that he’d finally connected the call he’d covertly been trying to make all day. She paused again at the very end of the hallway, glancing into the kitchen and retreating out of sight again. He was out in the open, leaning against the far bench with his eyes fixed on the floor, completely focused on his phone call. It should be an easy shot, and with that thought she forced a deep breath into her lungs and tried to squash the sick feeling in her stomach.

She swung around the corner, aimed and shot all in one smooth movement…but as she pulled the trigger, she already knew she’d missed. The bullet flew straight past his head and buried itself in the wall behind him instead, offset by her shaking hands and known lack of skill with a firearm. Clint dropped to the floor before it even hit the wall, phone call forgotten, and she cursed herself silently. The opportunity she’d been relying on to get this done was quickly disappearing, and she’d made it a whole lot harder for herself.

“Imogen?” he called from behind the bench.

“Clint.” Her hands were shaking again, and so was her voice. For the first time, she wondered if maybe this wasn’t a career she should be pursuing. If five years of training couldn’t prepare her to do what had to be done, what could?

“What are you doing?” he asked. She could hear the confusion in his voice, and thought maybe she heard a note of hurt in there too; but no, surely not.

“I’m following orders,” she told him firmly, just managing to stop her voice from trembling.

“Whose orders?” he pressed. “HYDRA’s?”

“It’s for the best,” she said, as much for her own benefit as for Clint’s. His head showed above the counter, and she fired before she could stop herself, bullet biting into the top of the bench as he ducked out of sight again.

“That I die?” he asked incredulously. “You want to expand on that?”

“I don’t have to explain anything to you.”

 There was a beat and then, to her amazement, he stepped out into the open, no gun or shield or anything but his wit to protect him. She eyed him suspiciously, trying to figure out his plan, but didn’t fire yet.

“You don’t have to do this, Imogen,” he told her, his own eyes focused on the gun in her hands.

“Yes, I do,” she replied, with as much conviction as she could muster up. “I’m sorry Clint, but I have to.” While she was busy wallowing in her own pity, he moved fast, crossing the space between them and grabbing her hand, twisting the gun out of her grip in one neat movement. It clattered to the ground, and he kicked at it, sending it spinning a few feet away. Forgetting the gun, Imogen jumped into action, throwing a fist at his stomach. He moved out of the way, the hit just glancing off his ribcage, and she turned with him, employing all her training and her skill at fighting dirty in the hallways just to keep up with him. Clint had her on the defence immediately, fighting her off with considerable ease to her frustration; and the more frustrated she got, the sloppier her attacks became.

His chance came quickly, and in one sharp movement, he tripped and pinned her to the ground. “Stop,” he told her firmly, voice filled with more authority than most of her commanders. She’d never listened to them though, and she wouldn’t listen now, squirming violently under his considerable weight to free one arm and snatching up the gun again.

She pressed it to his forehead.

“Are you really going to pull that trigger?” he asked calmly, meeting her eye. A horrible sinking feeling settled in her stomach at the realisation that this way, she would have to watch him die in excruciating detail.

“That’s the idea,” she forced out between clenched teeth.

He looked smug. “I don’t think you will.”

“Yeah?” she said with a frown. “Why not?”

The hint of a smile flashed across his face. “Because you’re scared.” She almost dropped the gun in surprise, realising with a sinking feeling that it was all too obvious she wasn’t properly trained for this. And however much she tried to deny it, she _was_ afraid to pull that trigger, in case he haunted her like Donoghue did. If she weren’t more afraid of Rockwell, she might have left this mission to someone else. As it was, she had no choice.

Her grip on the gun slackened, and in that moment Clint reached up and shoved it away from his face. She pulled the trigger on impulse, the bullet slamming into the wall behind him, and he ripped the weapon out of her hand, blocking her swinging fist with his other hand. “Sorry about this,” he muttered sympathetically before hitting her square in the forehead with the butt of the gun.

The world became dark and silent very, very fast.


	3. For And Against

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> New chapters every Tuesday! (hopefully lol)

When Imogen rose to consciousness, she was slumped in a kitchen chair, hands tied behind her back. Her head was pounding with a fog of pain that was hard to think through, and her whole body ached, like she’d gone a few rounds with a tiger. Gingerly, she tried moving and realised suddenly that she was firmly tied to the chair, which was definitely not a good sign. 

Lifting her head, her eyes fell on Clint, who was sitting across the room watching her, and the gun lying neatly on the bench beside him. “What’s going on?” she groaned, just as she remembered the fight. Her hands had been shaking, and the bullets had missed. He’d knocked her out.

“Well,” Clint answered slowly. “For one thing, you’re not trying to kill me. Which I’d say is a major improvement on our last conversation.”

“ _Major improvement?”_ she returned incredulously. “I’m tied to a chair.”

“Exactly,” he replied smugly. “Much better for both of us.” There was a bitter edge to his voice, one that she hadn’t heard from him before. He’d been watchful, been distrusting and held aloof, yes, but never cold and angry. It hurt her a little that she’d ruined that. Her own emotions surprised her.

In the silence that followed, they both became aware of the dull, insistant buzzing of her phone down the hallway, only audible because it was the only noise in the house. “What’s that?” Clint asked sharply, eyes turning to her.

“My brother calling me,” Imogen fired back. “Probably wanting to know why I haven’t texted him.” How long had she been out, she wondered? Minutes? _Hours_? The clock was behind her, so she had no way of telling the time. The window to her left was shaded in the half-light of twilight, so it must be either dusk or dawn. She _really_ hoped it wasn’t dawn.

Pushing off the bench, Clint disappeared down the hallway, coming back a moment later with her now silent phone and a laptop. He settled himself silently onto the benchtop, laptop perched on his knees, and didn’t look up again, much to her disgust. The phone rang again, and again, but both times he ignored it, tapping away busily at his keyboard.

While he was preoccupied, Imogen busied herself with testing the limits of the heavy tape that bound her hands, and the short rope that kept her in the chair. Why he had rope or where he had found it was beyond her, save for this exact purpose. Neither bindings budged at all – Clint knew what he was doing, and she didn’t have a trick good enough to get her out of them. It set her teeth on edge, being stuck in the same position as the time dragged past, her whole body getting stiffer with every passing minute. Clint didn’t even seem to notice her discomfort, busy doing whatever it was he was doing up there and even leaving the room once, coming back with a bag of gear that he dumped at his feet as he picked the laptop up again.

“Are you going to kill me soon?” she asked, when she could bear it no longer. “Because if you are, I’d rather just get it over with.”

“Actually, I thought I might just leave you there for a while,” he replied lightly.

“ _Why?_ ” she asked with a scowl. “What does that even achieve?”

For the first time since she’d woken, Clint looked up at her. “Thought it might teach you a lesson, actually,” he explained, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “About patience or something.”

“Oh.” She wriggled again, but to no avail; her bonds were tied firm. “It’s not working.”

“I noticed,” he replied lightly, and went back to whatever he was doing on the laptop.

“Any other wisdom you want to share while we’re here?”

He paused again. “Don’t trust HYDRA,” he said, completely serious. “And I’m not just saying that as a SHIELD agent. They’re nothing but bad news.”

“HYDRA aren’t the ones tying me to chairs,” she reminded him.

“No, they’re the ones sending an undertrained agent out to kill the best sniper in the world.”

She snorted, though her stomach did a flip at the thought that he might not be lying. “If you’re so good, why don’t you just shoot me already?”

He didn’t smile, but rather grimaced at the thought. “I don’t kill kids,” he said firmly.

“I’m not a kid,” she reminded him stubbornly, forgetting for a moment that being so young was the only thing keeping her alive.

“ _Twenty one_ is not old enough to be going out on missions,” he insisted. “Especially a kill mission.”

She made a noise of frustration, and wished she could throw her hands in the air. “Twenty one is old enough! I wasn’t even the youngest agent in my team.”

“Have you ever killed someone before?” he asked forcefully, leaning forward.

She flinched at his voice, and the image of Donoghue’s cold, staring eyes that swam into her mind. “Yes,” she spat out, a good deal less steady than she’d meant her voice to be.

He searched her face impassively. “ _Before_ the HYDRA takeover?” he clarified.

“None of your business.” Her refusal to say more was an answer in itself.

Clint crossed his arms and leant against the bench. “So, what, you’d rather I shoot you now and spend the next few months outrunning your brother when he comes to get revenge? Because I’m pretty sure he’s older than you, and I’m almost certain that when he catches up to me, he’s going to blame me for killing his kid sister.”

“That sounds really inconvenient for you,” Imogen snapped in frustration.

“Well, it is six months of HYDRA chasing me that I could spend catching up on _Dog Cops_ ,” he quipped in reply.

“What’s the alternative, then?” she asked, much too angry for someone who was only still alive because of their age. “We sit here and stare at each other forever?”

Clint shook his head. “I’ll give you a choice,” he replied, serious again. “SHIELD or HYDRA. Pick one. Quickly.”

Imogen’s eyes widened in surprise. “What?” she blurted out. _Was this some kind of trick question?_ If she betrayed HYDRA, she had no doubt they would find out about it, and then she would be dead because anyone who did not support their cause was someone who did not need to live. But how long would she live if she kept spitting HYDRA’s name back in his face? He’d said he wouldn’t kill her, but he could always change his mind.

Clint leant forward, like he could see the conflict in her face. “You know that they sent you here to die, don’t you Imogen?” he said, and there was not a hint of humour in his face.

“What would you know?” she bit back.

“When those helicarriers went down, so did all of SHIELD’s security,” he told her, turning the laptop towards him. “I picked your file up off the internet. You’re not exactly a loyal soldier, are you?” He frowned at the screen, and she knew he was looking at her record of training incidents. She’d seen it once or twice. It was a long list. “You got out of the academy as one of Donoghue’s pet projects, didn’t you? I’ve seen his project students. They’re never field ready.” He pushed the laptop away again. “So why are you, an undertrained junior agent, out here trying to kill me? Either you’ve convinced whoever sent you out here that you’re field ready – a hard sell with your track record – or you’ve gotten on the wrong side of some higher power and they’ve decided to get rid of you.”

Imogen stared at him in disbelief. And slowly, a seed of doubt began to grow.

It made sense, and she _hated_ that it did. Rockwell didn’t exactly _like_ her, not after she’d picked a fight with his brother and won. And he’d been all too happy to send her out on this mission to ‘prove herself’.

She was interrupted by the sound of the front door being kicked in. Without a second of hesitation, Clint flattened himself to the wall of the kitchen, swearing under his breath. He glanced at the gun on the bench, calculating the distance, but before he could go for it a light shone through the kitchen window, sweeping across the room, and he had to duck to avoid it. The light, coming from a flashlight held by someone outside, focused on Imogen instead, still tied to the chair in plain sight. She squinted against it, trying to see the person behind it, but all she could see were dark shadows in an even darker night.

They moved on then, heading around the back of the house to sweep the rest of the property. Clint darted to the window as soon as they were out of sight, undoing the latches and easing it up as quietly as he could. Imogen turned to the hallway, where two men were creeping towards them, silhouetted by the porch light glowing through the open door behind them. They burst into the room just as Clint turned back to get his stuff.

For a second, both parties stared at each other in surprise. Then, Clint turned and dove through the open window amidst a shower of bullets, crashing heavily into the garden bed outside.

“Get him,” a voice she recognised ordered. One of the new-comers went to the window, gun raised. The other removed his helmet and ran a hand through his hair, turning to Imogen. Her brother, Will, of course, coming to rescue her because she’d told him she didn’t need any help. “I’ve been calling you,” he said unhappily.

“I’ve been busy,” she replied.

“Doing what?” He tucked his gun away and set down the helmet, before going to work on the rope that bound her. “Almost getting yourself killed?”

“I wasn’t going to get killed.”

He huffed a laugh. “Yeah, you look like you’re totally in control of this situation.”

The rope fell away and for the first time in hours, she moved and stretched out her stiff muscles. “Look, I’m fine. I had to at least _try_ to finish the mission. Rockwell would have killed me if I ran away.” She realised with a jolt that this was almost an echo of what Clint had been trying to tell her before he left.

A shout from outside drew their attention, and they joined Will’s other man at the window to see what was going on. Out in the yard, trapped between the house and a high fence, Clint was scuffling with three other HYDRA agents – and _winning._ He fought like a man possessed, kicking and punching and driving each of them back as soon as they found a window to advance. A few seconds later, he slammed one man into the fence, hard, and he crumpled to the ground in a heap. The second one fell into a rose bush and struggled to rise again, concussed and held down by long thorns and crushed flowers.

The third man was in for a shock, when Barton drove him to his knees with a sharp kick, and then put a foot on his shoulder; just high enough to give him the boost he needed to grab onto the fence and swing a leg over, hauling himself ungracefully into the neighbour’s yard and out of sight.

 The night fell silent and suddenly uneventful. “Idiots,” Will muttered, and stepped away. “Go help them, Johnson.” The man who had been standing at the window taking pot shots nodded and headed for the back door.

“You think you could have taken _that_?” Will asked, turning back to her.

Imogen shrugged. “I could have tried.”

“Do you even know who he is?”

She shook her head, and Will grabbed her arm, towing her around the bench to where Clint’s stuff still sat in a neat pile on the floor. “See the bow?” he said, pointing to it. “Who works for SHIELD and specialises in archery?”

“Hawkeye,” she said slowly. “But…there’s no way that guy is an Avenger.”

“Why not?” Will demanded.

“He’s kind of a wreck,” she pointed out. “He doesn’t…I don’t know. He just doesn’t act like an Avenger. His escape plan was _jump through the window and see what happens_ , for god’s sake.”

“He’s an Avenger,” Will insisted. “And he was going to kill you.”

 _No he wasn’t._ A voice whispered the treacherous thought in the back of her mind.

 _Yes, he was,_ she told it firmly, pushing it aside.

“This is why you should listen to me, next time,” he finished smugly. She rolled her eyes.

“Let’s go,” she said determinedly, pushing past him towards the front door, determined not to think about all the ways this whole mission could have gone differently.


	4. The Doubt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo this is two days late...and I missed last week (though I have an excuse for that sooo)...but I swear I'm gonna keep on top of the updates. Pinky promise. Cross my heart.
> 
> Might get chapter 5 out on like, Saturday? For extras? Otherwise, just the usual Tuesday updates lol
> 
> Please leave a comment, even if it's just a smiley face! :D

The room was grey.

So far as she’d seen, Will’s entire base was grey, from floor to ceiling to furniture. Even the clothes they’d given her were grey. The only colour she’d seen so far was the HYDRA logo someone had painted over SHIELD’s eagle on the wall outside mission control. The red paint had still been drying as she’d walked past, dripping down the wall and pooling on the floor below like blood. Like the eagle was bleeding, she’d thought in passing, an involuntary shiver running down her spine.

This particular HYDRA base was little more than an oversized bunker, built for functionality over comfort. Most everyone who walked down its halls were suited up in full tac gear and carrying an array of weapons, on their way to and from various missions. There were no offices here, no places to relax after a hard training session or a long stint in the field. There was debrief and mission control and a row of dorms and not much else.

Imogen had been given a quick tour. Command, gun range, weapons storage, mess hall, living quarters. They’d directed her to a room and told her on no uncertain terms to stay put. Impressively, she’d listened, and as a result had wasted away hours upon hours just lying on the bed, staring blankly at the ceiling. At first, she’d managed to drift in and out of sleep, tired from the whole thing with Clint – with _Hawkeye_ – but sleep was long gone now, and instead she lay wide awake rolling his words over and over in her head.

_SHIELD or HYDRA._

_Pick one._

It bugged her that the question was still there, looming, unanswered. That he’d gotten inside her head and made her question everything; that she hadn’t had the guts to lift her chin and proudly tell him that HYDRA was her choice. That HYDRA had given her everything she had, and she wouldn’t just betray them for it. Most of all, it bugged her that it bugged her. Anyone else would just let it go, move on, leave him for the wolves of HYDRA to feast on (this whole base was focused on finding and killing Clint Barton, so far as she knew. He wouldn’t live long now). But here she was, still trying to convince herself that her place was still with HYDRA.

She needed to get out of this room, before it drove her crazy.

As soon as the temptation found her, Imogen couldn’t lie still any longer. It was a miracle she had lasted this long at all; patience was a virtue flung far out of her reach. With a deep sigh, she sat up and then stood, stretching out muscles that were still aching from their abuse the day before. It was a satisfying feeling. She was cautious going out the door, though there was no one outside to catch her sneaking out, making it all too easy to wind her way through to a main thoroughfare and blend into the traffic.

Where to go? To Will? She didn’t know or recognise anyone else on this base, nor did she want to. Anyone who knew her would screw up their nose and move quickly in the other direction. People found her repulsive like that; no one had ever really taken a shine to her (her parents were a possible exception, but she had no memories to compare). She’d been born to turn people away.

She shook her head, just a little. To Will, then.

Her brother was in the mess hall, sitting at a crowded table with the small team he’d lead against Clint. They were eating bowls of soup, and laughing at a joke one of them had just told. He spotted her mid-laugh, spoon halfway to his mouth, and dropped everything immediately, excusing himself as he stood up and left the table. He met her in the middle of the room, and pulled her over to one side, where there were less people to hear them.

“What are you doing, Imogen?” he asked with a frown.

She shrugged. “I’m bored, Will. I can’t sit in that room all day; you know that.”

He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re just going to have to,” he told her. “Just suck it up and wait.”

“Why?”

“We’ve all got things to do, Imogen. Besides, I haven’t even talked to the commander about you being here. Technically, you’re still under Rockwell’s command. You want to go back there?”

“No,” she muttered reluctantly.

“Exactly. So go back to your room and stay out of the way until I have a chance to sort it out.”

Frustrated, she gritted her teeth and balled her hands up into fists, nails pressing painfully into her palms. “Fine,” she replied finally, not bothering to hide her displeasure. She turned to leave but didn’t quite escape before Will caught her shoulder, turning her back to him. “What?”

He pressed a keycard into her hand. “My room’s just down the hall from yours. Go and find something to do; read a book, play a game, I don’t care as long as you stay put.”

Taking the card, she threw him another filthy look and escaped the mess hall as fast as she could. Fuming quietly, she let her feet carry her back to the living quarters of the base without really thinking about it, finding her way to Will’s room. It was identical to hers – same bed, same desk, and same endless grey. Will had more possessions than she did though; a neat stack of books on the desk, a bar of chocolate, clothes scattered here and there.

It was the grey laptop on his bed that caught her attention though.

Shoving the keycard in her pocket, she flopped down onto the bed and opened the computer. The screen blinked on, asking her for a password, and without pause she tapped in the ID number from his keycard, unlocking the device. It was the password he used for everything, she knew, which also happened to be the reason she’d memorised the sequence of letters and numbers unique to her brother. You never knew when access to a higher clearance level could come in handy (even if that access was limited – SHIELD was more into retinal scans and voice prints than passwords for security).

The laptop opened to one of the standard programs installed by SHIELD, a system that monitored news feeds and media from all over the world for whatever it was you wanted information on. Currently, Will had it searching for information on SHIELD and HYDRA, and the results were pouring in. The whole thing with the helicarriers in DC had gone viral the minute someone noticed it was happening, and the file dump had followed soon after. The whole world was talking about it, and with good reason. She threw a precursory glance over the latest feeds, intending to shut the program down, but one caught her eye and she stopped. She picked it from the crowd, enlarging it.

Grainy, unprofessional footage of two men fighting on a backdrop of broken cars began to play. Captain America was the obvious subject of the video, dressed in civilian clothes but fighting with his obnoxious shield. The guy he was fighting was what had caught her attention though; he was dressed in full tac gear, except for his left arm. That arm gave off a metallic gleam in the sunlight as it smashed into the pavement, the deep red star painted on his shoulder facing straight towards the camera. It was hard to tell from the quality of the video, but it looked like he might be _winning_ , despite being up against Captain America, of all people.

The regular traffic on the internet didn’t know what to make of it. Most of the posts about this guy were white noise, the equivalent of a screaming crowd. Only a few people had managed to actually dig up some useful information. They were calling him the Winter Soldier, though whether that was what he decided he wanted to be known as or what someone had cleverly come up with in the last few hours was unclear. There were rumours that he was mentioned in several of the files that had been dumped all over the internet by someone in DC, and one theory involving a 70 year old ghost story that she ignored.

The files were slowly disappearing as SHIELD and HYDRA pulled down as much of it as they could, but the public had jumped on them the moment they became available and so there was at least one copy of everything to be found if you looked hard enough. Imogen was good at this sort of thing, when she wanted to be.

Even so, there was precious little information on Captain America’s new nemesis. What she could find was hidden under layers and layers of useless SHIELD information and protocol, piggybacked onto the system in places where no one would think to look for it. A few mission reports, health evaluations, some other documents that made little sense to her, most of them written in languages that were definitely not English, though she had no idea further than that. She wasn’t a linguist. But they were definitely about him; every file referred to ‘the Asset’ or the ‘Winter Soldier’.

In one, there was a mention of cryogenics, a reference to another report. That file was SHIELD property, easy to find compared to the HYDRA files. She only skimmed it, not in the mood to decipher the scientific jargon that filled the report. The name at the bottom would be the most interesting part of the paper anyway. A name could be traced to an employee record and to further reports.

Any plans on digging for more information on the soldier fell from her mind at the name though, thoughts turning to other things. _Kathleen Haylock_ was typed out at the bottom, marking the report as one her mother had written. Imogen shoved the laptop away from her for a moment, sucking in a deep breath. Really, she should have expected something like this. She knew her mother worked for HYDRA, knew she’d had an interest in cryogenics and done a lot of research on the subject. Somewhere in SHIELD’s archives there was a whole box dedicated to her theories. But she’d never actually _carried out_ any of her research, not for SHIELD anyway.

_Now_ she was curious.

Sending a copy of the cryo report to her phone for later reference, she closed it and went searching for anything related to her mother. A SHIELD employee file came up, but didn’t tell her much, as well as several mission and injury reports and a few more reports on a cryogenics project SHEILD didn’t know she’d worked on.

There was a picture in one – a man, frozen. Imogen shivered and clicked away from the report as fast as she could, trying not to think about her mother experimenting on people. It was a lot to swallow.

Right at the very bottom, there was a mission report that wasn’t marked by SHIELD and until recently had been heavily encrypted – HYDRA. It didn’t even look like a report really; it lacked the formality and utter disinterest of any other paperwork she’d ever encountered.

_Targets: Agent Michael Haylock; Agent Kathleen Haylock._

_Mission successful._

Imogen sucked in a breath, staring at the screen, confused. Her parents shouldn’t be listed as HYDRA targets. They’d been killed by enemies of SHIELD looking for retribution, not HYDRA. Or at least, that’s what Will had told her.

He wouldn’t lie to her, would he? Not about this. He knew how much it meant to her, how everything that happened to her, everything she did, had revolved around their deaths.

Written at the bottom of the report: _Agent Cassandra Brady to continue surveillance of Item 548._

That name distracted her completely from Will. _Cassandra Brady_. She hated that woman. She was the woman (and apparently also HYDRA agent) who had moved in across the street from them in their sleepy backwater town a few months before their parents had died. She’d become fast friends with the Haylocks; well, except for Imogen, who had never liked her. And then, when they’d become orphans, she’d adopted both Haylock children without a second thought, pretending to be sympathetic and caring and kind until they were hers.

It made sense now, why she had taken them in, and why she had turned face as soon as the news and the nosy neighbours had lost interest in the whole thing.  She’d been hard and uncompromising throughout their time with her, angry when Imogen got into fights and arguments at school and ignorant of anything either child did the rest of the time. When Will joined SHIELD before he’d even finished school, she didn’t even seem to notice. And then, she’d barely lasted three years of waiting for Imogen to leave before disappearing entirely just before her fifteenth birthday. Raising children had just been one long, unhappy assignment for her.

The thought of that woman being on the same side as her parents – as _her_ – repulsed her. The fact that Brady had been involved in her parent’s deaths only made her angrier. And Item 548 confused her. It was something that her parents had been in possession of, that much was apparent, but she had no idea _what_ exactly. Everything the family had owned was claimed and either sold or trashed by that woman. If two children couldn’t escape that fate (and she might as well have thrown them out with all the family photos, because Imogen was certain nothing was the same as it could have been), then how could any random item?

So Cassandra Brady had lied to her every day for the ten years she’d acted as ‘mother’. She was not the next door neighbour, not her old babysitter from the days when she had a family, but a HYDRA agent, involved in the assassination of the people she had dared to call friends and then sent to watch over their children and whatever Item 548 was.

Within the next twenty minutes, Imogen found numerous missions completed by a younger Agent Brady, and just one by the woman as Imogen had known her. Item 548 came up again. So did Brady’s death – at HYDRA’s hands, for being a deserter.

She couldn’t say she felt anything but hate.

There was something still bothering her about the note marking her parent’s death. Trawling through the mess of files, she pulled up Will’s. Immediately, a note on an ongoing mission caught her attention, bringing her to mission details.

It was simple.

_Protect Item 548._

The mission dated back _years_ ; he’d had it before she’d even joined SHIELD. She couldn’t, in all those years, ever remember him mentioning it though, not once in the hundreds of times she’d asked him if he had anything from their parents. But this mission, this item being passed down from her parents, to Brady, to Will, this said differently.

He’d been lying, she realised suddenly. And before he had lied to her, Brady had been. There was no doubt about it. She couldn’t tell herself anything different, not unless she wanted to be a liar as well. The seed of doubt in her mind bloomed like a rose in the spring. If he’d lied about this, who knew what else he’d kept from her. Maybe everything was a lie. Maybe he’d never said a true thing in his life.

And why had he lied to her? Because HYDRA had told him to, probably. They liked to lie, she’d discovered as she read, just like SHIELD had.

She was so _sick_ of it. All her life, she’d followed lie after lie after lie, built herself around beliefs that were just someone’s idea of a joke. She wanted to scream and rage and break something.

She sat. Silent.

Her thoughts drifted back to Barton. Back to the things he’d said.

_I don’t want to kill you._

_You’ve gotten on the wrong side of some higher power and they’ve decided to get rid of you._

_SHIELD or HYDRA?_

_SHIELD or HYDRA?_

Her fingers found the card in her pocket, a key to the rest of the base. She knew what to do now. Abandoning the laptop and the room, she entered the concrete maze that was the base, striding with a confidence she didn’t really have. No one questioned her. They barely even looked at her, all too confident themselves. The hall leading to the archives was completely deserted. No one here was interested in paperwork and artifacts, apparently; not that there would be anything very interesting kept here.

She found it dumped on a shelf right in the very back, amid a myriad of other seized weapons that no one knew how to use. They probably didn’t work anyway, probably never had a chance to; created by some half-baked evil scientist in the back of his garage. The bow didn’t look right, thrown uncaringly on top of a pile of science experiments gone wrong – it was too sleek, too dark, like it belonged to another world. The quiver was there too, and she snatched up both, bundling them up in a blanket she’d borrowed from Will’s room.

Her trip back to her room lacked the confidence she’d feigned earlier – she tried, but her heart was beating in double time and her steps quickened to match. Every time she passed someone it leapt into her throat, then fell back into her chest with a dull thud. Surely they could hear it. No one stopped her though.

The door clicked shut behind her and she breathed sigh of relief, slumping against it, her prize in her arms. After a moment, she forced herself to move, stashing it in a corner of the wardrobe and knocking over a stack of SHIELD-issue clothing to cover it. Just as she finished, there was a knock at the door; she checked once more that the bow was out of sight and then answered it.

It was Will, of course. No one else would have any reason to knock on her door. “I need my key back,” he said, holding out his hand.

She dug the card out of her pocket and handed it to him. “Thanks,” she muttered, not really paying attention to what she was saying.

He frowned. “Are you okay?” he asked, stopping her from closing the door with one hand.

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You just said thanks. Since when do you have manners?”

“Funny,” she snapped, shoving the door closed. For a moment, she waited, expecting him to force his way back in and demand to know why she was acting weird, but he just sighed loudly and walked away.

She slumped onto her bed, staring at her hands. For the first time in her life, she wanted a way out.


	5. To Find An Archer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone should come be friends on tumblr, at my writing blog: sparrow-fic, or my main blog: herebesparrows :)

The thing about small bases was that they tended to run on a cycle that wasn’t unlike the regular, nine-to-five business hours, except that no one actually left the building at the end of the day. During the day, the halls were a hive of activity, people going in every direction. When night fell – well, you could almost mistake the place for deserted. Lights were dimmed, agents went to sleep, and guards took up their rotations. There were always a few people in mission control, of course, but they were only there to monitor any action, as very few high-level ops ran from here.

Imogen knew the cycle well. She’d lived on a base just a little bigger than this for a good two years now. No matter how many night ops people went on, they always fell back into the same routine of rising and retiring with the sun. So once the clock ticked over to two AM and the base was as quiet as it would ever be, Imogen left her room, closing the door softly and creeping away down the hall. The bow and quiver were an unfamiliar weight on her back, strapped across her shoulder; she’d prefer not to carry them openly, but there was no other way to take them with her. At least this way, her hands were free for fighting, if it came to that. Hopefully the shadows in the halls would hide them from immediate view if she came across anyone.

And if someone did notice them, there was a gun at her side, and she had a mean left hook.

The halls were deserted, letting her pass through the base like a ghost, unseen. Every room was dark, except for the empty mess hall and mission control, where a handful of people sat hunched over bright screens and mission files, their attention far away from the woman creeping past outside.

The staircase was the problem. As one of only two ways out of the bunker, there was always someone watching over it. During the day, they’d been placed above ground, in the small building that acted as a disguise for the operations below, but now there was a woman at the bottom of the stairs, leaning against the wall and looking bored. It was immediately clear that Imogen wouldn’t be able to sneak past – the whole staircase was lit up like a Christmas tree – and there would be no bluffing her way out either, not with the bow and quiver.

For a moment her fingers touched the gun, like she would be brave enough to shoot someone from the shadows she was hiding in. Not that it was a very good plan anyway; the shot would echo in this big concrete prison, drawing her unwanted attention from who knows how many other people. Mission control wasn’t very far away, and there would be other guards roaming the halls even if she’d managed to avoid them until now.

And that was before she even accounted for how her hands had shaken when she’d tried to shoot Clint. There was no time for mistakes like that in this sort of environment, where she was forced to face the woman at close quarters.

There was only one way to do this then.

She stepped out of the shadows. The other woman jerked upright, caught off guard by the sudden company. “What are you doing here?” she snapped, replacing surprise with anger, trying to cover up that she hadn’t been paying any attention to her surroundings at all.

“Got some business upstairs,” Imogen replied, gesturing at the stairs with one hand. The other played with her loose hair, trying to block the woman’s view of the weapons she was carrying. She wondered how Barton even pulled off covert operations with this thing.

The agent’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that behind your back?” she asked.

Imogen frowned, feigning confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play games with me, kid,” the woman threatened, stepping within Imogen’s reach. “That right-“ Imogen cut her off, lunging forward in a tackle that drove the point of her shoulder into the guard’s stomach, driving the air from her lungs. Both women went crashing to the ground, the guard struggling to push Imogen off her. One of her elbows caught the blonde in the face; growling at the sudden burst of pain in her jaw, Imogen pinned down her arms and wrapped her fingers around her throat, bearing down with all her weight.

The woman bucked and struggled, trying to throw off the smaller girl but to no effect; slowly, the lack of oxygen began to take effect, her movements becoming feebler until finally she fell still. “Not a kid,” Imogen muttered under her breath, getting up and dusting herself off, touching the spot on her jaw where the woman had hit her. She’d have a bruise there, probably. Oh well.

Upstairs and through a door, and then she was in another hallway, this one wood-paneled and a great improvement on the plain concrete of the basement level. The voices of two men drifted from somewhere up ahead; relaxed, mindless chatter to keep them awake more than anything else. They’d heard none of her short battle downstairs apparently, but they were also between her and the door.

She shook her head slightly. Had she really been expecting to just walk out the front door? Silently, she crept down the hall, and looked into each of the rooms that lined it until she found one with a window. It was a sitting room, dressed like it belonged in a farmhouse with faded, floral sofas, a fireplace with a mantel full of agricultural awards, and an old TV set on the other side of the room.

The door clicked softly behind her and she crept across the room, daring a look out of the window. Outside was dark, except for a light set over the door of a huge, shadowy barn that sat across a dusty yard. Beyond that, she could see a line of trees and then what looked like a field. HYDRA was hiding underneath a _farm_. She’d missed that on the drive in, thanks to the window-less van her rescue crew had been using for transport.

She’d have to run across a field to get out, she realized, resigning herself to that fact with a long sigh. Reaching up, she unlocked the window and pushed it up high enough that she could get out. It slid up without a sound, but as soon as it was up an alarm went off somewhere in the building, its high-pitched whining loud enough to be heard even downstairs. She jumped at the sound, and then started moving quicker, pulling the bow and quiver over her head and dumping them unceremoniously through the window. There were footsteps in the hall; without caring how she landed, she dove through the window head-first, her heart thundering in her ears.

She caught herself with her arms, moments before her face smashed into the ground. With a grunt, she pulled her legs through and landed in a crumpled heap in a garden bed. Not a moment later, the door to the room she’d just left slammed open and the light flicked on, sending a wave of gold to light up the garden. Her breath catching in her throat, she scrambled to pull herself under a large bush to her right, shoving the weapons along in front of her, the low-lying branches of the bush parting to let her through and then falling again to cover her tracks.

It became immediately apparent that she’d climbed under a rosebush or something to that effect, thorns grabbing at her clothes as she pushed and wriggled her way under it. Gritting her teeth and mentally cursing her bad luck, she pulled herself free and continued, curling up between the bush and the wall and making herself as small as possible.

A bald head poked itself out of the open window, staring out at the trees behind the barn, and then the shadows around the barn itself. Imogen froze as his eyes swept in one direction and then the next, hardly daring to breathe. A broken branch was trapped beneath her, thorns pressing painfully into her side. From the corner of her eye, she saw him turn down towards the bushes, and imagined that he paused to scrutinize the suspicious patch of dark grey on the other side of the bush, that his ears turned towards the sound of her shallow breaths. If he did notice, he didn’t seem particularly alarmed as he disappeared, saying something to his partner as he closed the window and his muffled footsteps left the room.

She counted to a rushed twenty to give them time to leave the room and then moved, pulling herself free of the bush with a string of hissed swear words that only the dark night could hear. They’d be back before long, searching for whoever had opened the window; even if they thought someone had broken _in_ rather than _out,_ she needed to get moving. Stepping clear of the garden, she reached down and retrieved the bow and quiver, throwing them over her shoulder without caring if anyone could see them now.

Following the shadow of the building, she darted down towards what seemed to be the back of the building. There was a large shed here, full of machinery and totally unlit, and then another tree line behind it. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she glanced around and then ran across the open yard, past the shed and into the relative safety of the trees.

There were torchlights swinging across the yard now, but most of them were heading for the barn. Imogen pushed through the trees and found herself at the edge of a paddock. She started running before she could lose her nerve, arrows bouncing against her back. Looking back, she glimpsed the torches sweeping back and forth and quickened her pace.

Without warning, a rock materialised in front of her foot, grabbing at her boot and bringing her crashing down into a ditch. She let out a strangled cry as she fell heavily on her right shoulder and rolled, tucking herself into a ball again. Frozen, she lay waiting for shouts and flashing lights to expose her, but they didn’t come.

Calm down. She had to calm down. Forcing a few deep breaths to shudder through her frame, she slowly untangled herself and turned, crawling to the edge of the ditch. The torches were on this side of the building now, but hadn’t strayed far out. Maybe they had thought someone wanted to get in rather than out. Whatever the reason, she thanked her lucky stars they hadn’t seen her running.

Sliding ungracefully back into the ditch, she sat herself down in the dirt and waited a minute for her heart to slow to a more reasonable pace. She could already feel an ache setting into her shoulder and ankle, which she guessed she’d twisted when she fell. Her arms and back stung too, where the thorns from the bush had pushed through her shirt to scratch at the skin below. With one hand, she reached back and ran a hand over the ends of the arrows – they felt as tight-packed as ever. Somehow she hadn’t lost any throughout the whole ordeal. That was handy.

With a groan, she picked herself up out of the dirt, testing her weight on her sore foot. The ache got worse for a moment, but it bore her weight without too much complaint. Not twisted too badly then. With some difficulty she climbed out of the ditch and started running again, ignoring the pain until the lights of HYDRA searching for her had long since faded away into the night.

 ----------

By some bad luck, Will had found himself in mission control at two in the morning instead of sleeping peacefully in his bed, like he should have been. Whoever had caused the base-wide alert in the middle of the night was going to pay if he ever caught up to them, he decided as he yawned and rubbed at his eyes in a desperate attempt to keep himself awake. They could have at least had the decency to wait until morning.

“Run me through what happened again?” he asked Murphy, more for something to focus on than because he’d forgotten any details. His eyes followed the agents bustling back and forth down the hall outside. Nothing like an emergency to get everybody moving.

Murphy sat back from his computer, swinging his chair to face Will. He liked Murphy – they were very similar in a lot of ways. They both stood at an average height with brown hair almost falling in their eyes, both were faithful members of HYDRA, both had younger sisters (Murphy hadn’t seen his in ten years while Will couldn’t shake Imogen, but that was beside the point). What differences they had complemented each other too; Will was more active, more suited to being a field agent, while Murphy liked to hang back and work on the technical side of things, gathering intel and guiding Will through the comm link. And while Murphy kept Will safe in the field, Will kept Murphy (who wasn’t particularly popular with some people around the place) out of trouble back at base.

“Someone broke in upstairs a couple of hours ago,” he began, adjusting the glasses perched precariously on his nose. “Came in through a window, dodged the upstairs guards, tried to suffocate Agent Porter. She’s still unconscious.” The computer beeped, drawing his attention. “Looks like there’s some stuff missing from Archives, which would explain why they bothered breaking in.”

Will leant forward to better see the screen. “What was taken?” he asked. Murphy frowned, at his screen, pulling up an archive file.

“Bow,” he answered, brow furrowed in confusion. “Arrows. What is this, the Hunger Games?”

Will leant back again, giving Murphy’s chair a shove with one foot, a lazy grin coming over his face as the other man grabbed the desk to stop himself rolling away. “They’re the weapons we took from Barton the other day, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Murphy still looked confused. “You think he came back for them?”

Will shrugged. “I wouldn’t put it past him. Might sound like a crazy idea to you, but the guy’s pretty unorthodox.”

A young agent hurried through the door, catching Will’s attention. Seeing that the rest of the room was busy, the boy approached them, wringing his hands nervously. “Agent Grace sent me,” he quivered. “They did a headcount, and there’s someone missing.”

“Who?” Murphy asked. Will closed his eyes. He already knew the answer; no matter what you did with her, you just couldn’t keep her out of trouble.

“Imogen Haylock,” the kid replied, confirming his fears. His weapons weren’t the only thing Barton had come back for.

“Will?” he heard Murphy ask, when he didn’t say anything straight away.

He opened his eyes. “I’m going to go find the team,” he decided, standing abruptly. “See if we can get any leads on Barton. He can’t have gotten far.”

“I’m on comms if you need me,” Murphy said with a nod, which Will returned before standing and leaving the room, already outlining search plans in his head.

 ----------

Dawn was just painting the horizon when Imogen finally managed to make her way back to the safe house, leaving two stolen cars and three different towns in her wake. She dumped the car she’d driven the last hour or so two streets away from the house, grabbing the bow and arrows as she did – though she intended to keep this car a little longer, if she was chased, she didn’t want to have to circle back for them.

The house was quiet and deserted; no fights to shatter the peaceful morning, no lights shining from any of the windows even though all of the curtains had been pulled right back. The front door standing ajar was her biggest clue that no one was home – HYDRA had already gotten everything they needed from here, obviously, and gone off chasing leads on Barton.

She sort of wished _she_ had a lead on him too.

A shiver ran down her spine as she entered the dark house, skirting around the front door and its broken lock. It was eerily silent inside, and so far from the warm comfort it had given the first time she’d walked through that door that she’d almost walked straight back out again. Nothing had been touched, so far as she could see – the living room sat just as she’d left it, moments before she’d gone after Clint with a gun, and the beds in their various rooms were all still neatly made. The bag of clothes she’d originally brought with her was even still in the closet of the room she’d used, though it had obviously been rifled through. She snatched it up gratefully. In all the mayhem of Will’s entrance and Barton’s exit, she’d completely forgotten about it when she’d left and now these were the only things she owned.

The kitchen was the only room worse for wear, with a broken window that no one had bothered to fix. Her plate from breakfast was still sitting on the bench, though Clint’s laptop was gone and so was the bag he’d left with his weapons when HYDRA had come. Someone had even gone to the trouble of tucking the chair she’d been tied to back into its spot around the table at the other end of the room.

What caught her eye about the room though, were the deep gouges in the kitchen bench, half hidden by her plate, that definitely hadn’t been there the last time she’d seen this room. Pushing the plate to the side, she squinted in the half light of dawn in an attempt to make out what she was pretty sure were letters, roughly carved into the wooden benchtop. S-P-O was all she could make out before she gave up and got her phone out, shining the light over the letters.

S-P-O-K-A-N-E.

Imogen reeled back in surprise. It _had_ to be Clint who had left the message – there was no reason for anyone else to. Was it for her, though? Or someone else? Only a moment later, she realised she didn’t care. She knew where to find Clint. Spokane wasn’t far from here, if she remembered correctly, only a few hours. If she moved quickly enough, she could get there before HYDRA even caught on to her trail of stolen cars, and if she switched license plates on the one she was driving now…well, that would throw them off the trail for a while, at least. Until they came to check here and found the same clue she had.

Deftly, she slid the plate back over the crude carving, covering the whole thing this time, and then all but ran out of the house and back to her car. It wouldn’t be long until HYDRA were crawling all over the city of Spokane, if they weren’t already. And she was going to find Clint, she’d decided. She was going to make her choice.


	6. Stormwater

The rain started just as Imogen reached the city of Spokane. It was just a light patter of drops on the windscreen at first, but before long it had built into a proper deluge. The day was grey and gloomy, thunder rumbling in the distance; for a while, she just sat in her car, parked in the back of a reasonably empty parking lot, and watched the rain slide down the windows. She could feel the weariness setting in from not having slept the night before, slowing her mind and exaggerating her aches and pains. She almost dozed off right there and then, but no, she had to find Barton first.

If he wanted to be found. If that message really had been for her and wasn’t just there to throw HYDRA off the scent.

Flipping up the hood of her jacket, she took a deep breath and then left the warm interior of her car for the rain outside, pushing the bow and quiver as far out of sight as she could. No sense in leaving them out in the open. Then she started walking.

She’d come to the main shopping district of the city, more because of the promise of food than because she thought she might find Clint here. She had no idea where else to start looking, or if he had already seen her, or if HYDRA were following her right now and she just hadn’t noticed. The street was quiet, most people driven away by the rain or working at this time of the day. The stores looked warm and welcoming in comparison to the deluge outside; the first coffee shop she saw, she just stopped and stared at for a while, trying to decide if she should eat or keep going. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the window, wet hair sticking to her forehead and dripping down her back, dirt still smeared on her face, a lovely bruise blooming on her jaw. Her clothes were cleaner now, though still torn and dirty-looking, from climbing under thorny bushes and rolling around in ditches.

She decided to keep going.

There was no sign of Barton, the whole way down the street, but there was a cluster of fast food stores at the end of the road, brightly coloured and too inviting to ignore. At the sight of them, her stomach finally won out, and she used most of her meagre savings buying herself a burger and fries. The burger was gone before she even made it out of the store.

Walking back to her car, she wondered where she should go next. To hotels or something, maybe, or drive some of the residential streets in search of a safe house. Her chances of finding him, she realised now that she was here, were very low – and it was likely that he’d moved on anyway, or had never been here in the first place. She should really just keep driving too, before HYDRA caught up with her. It wasn’t hard to follow a trail of stolen cars, especially not for a good agent like Will, and she’d left a pretty clear trail. She didn’t have the knowledge or skills to go hacking into police reports or anything like that to throw them off the scent.

Rounding the corner to the parking lot, she stopped dead. None other than Clint Barton was leaning against her car, arrows slung over one shoulder and bow resting casually in his hand.

When he saw her, he pushed off the car and picked his way through the mess of broken glass on the ground that used to be a window. “I thought you’d come back,” he said cheerfully. “What happened to your face?”

She touched her bruised jaw. “I left HYDRA,” she explained bluntly, trying to sound braver than she was. In truth, she felt overexposed, standing in the corner of a wide open parking lot with this man who was good enough at fighting to be on the _Avengers_. “What happened to yours?”

He smoothed out the dinosaur bandaid on his nose. There was another one on his temple, a spot of cartoon t-rexes amidst a wide patch of bruising. How he didn’t have a black eye too, she wasn’t sure. “Fell over a fence,” he admitted sheepishly. “Y’know, after fighting off your friends the other day.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“Sure.” He looked around, surreptitiously checking the place for HYDRA or cameras or whatever else it was paranoid people got worried about. “You want to talk?” he asked.

Imogen shrugged. “I want to get out of the rain.”

“We should get coffee,” he decided, slinging the bow over his shoulder and marching past her, back towards the coffee shop she’d been admiring earlier. She hurried after him, shivering as a cold breeze picked up and pushed right through her wet clothing.

The shop, to her relief, was warm and cozy inside, with a fake fireplace that was more likely a gas burner installed in the centre of the room. Noticing her shivering, Clint pointed her towards a booth right next to the fireplace and then went over to the counter to get his coffee. She slumped into the seat facing the wall and then sat and drank in the heat coming off of the fireplace, willing her body to stop shaking now that it wasn’t cold. Behind her, she could hear the murmur of voices as Clint got into a friendly conversation with the girl making his coffee. If she turned around, she was sure she would see him leaning on the counter, with a stupid grin that matched the dinosaur bandaids on his face.

She almost dozed off again before he came back, a cup of coffee in each hand. As he set them down, she found herself wondering if he’d ever been a waiter, before he’d become SHIELD’s best archer.

“So you’ve left HYDRA for good?” he asked as he sat down.

She huffed a sigh. “No,” she said, reaching for one of the plastic spoons next to the napkin holder in the middle of the table.

“So you’ll go back.” He stared at her over the rim of his coffee cup as he gulped down a mouthful.

She shrugged, and stirred her coffee idly. “Maybe.”

“Why’d you leave then?”

“A lot of people have been lying to me,” she snapped.

He chuckled, gulping down more of his coffee. “The whole organization is built on lies, kid. You better get used to it.”

“Not a kid,” she insisted.

“You look like a kid.”

“You need to get your eyes checked.”

“You need your brain checked. My eyes are _fine_.” Imogen shrugged again, too tired to continue arguing. “So what are you going to do?” he pressed. “Drive around until you decide what you want?”

“Don’t know yet.” Her eyes drifted to the window. “Depends.”

“On HYDRA?” She hummed in reply, earning a sigh from Clint. “I don’t know much about HYDRA, but they don’t seem like the type that would take back deserters.”

She took in a deep, controlled breath. He’d hit the nail on the head, of course. HYDRA didn’t take kindly to people who left them; deserters or otherwise. She could easily have signed her death warrant the moment she climbed out of that window, and she’d have no way of knowing until they caught up with her, or she turned herself in. That was her choice now, she realised. That was her choice, and both could end with a bullet in her head.

When she didn’t answer, Clint laughed, a short, humourless bark spat out between sips of coffee as he lifted his mug to his lips.

“Why’d you give me a choice anyway?” she asked. Behind her, the door opened, a wave of cold air reaching for the back of her neck and sending shivers down her spine. She saw Clint’s eyes dart over the newcomer but kept her own focused on him, acting casual. She saw the man’s back as he walked past a moment later – heavily built, wrapped in a thick jacket, bald head, and the acrid smell of cigarette smoke following him through the room.

Clint sighed, mug clinking back down onto the table. “Told you. I didn’t want to kill you. Don’t like killing kids.”

“But I’m HYDRA.”

A smile broke over his face. “I can fix that. Could have fixed that. Kids are always the easiest to fix.”

“I’m not broken,” she said indignantly.

“That’s not what I’m saying.” His answer was so abrupt that silence fell between them for a minute. “You don’t really believe in all of HYDRA’s crap about ruling the world, do you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’ve known a few people like you,” he said around his coffee. “People who are on the wrong side and don’t know how to get out.”

“Yeah, you seem real popular,” she remarked dryly. “So popular that the only people who want to hang out with you now are the ones that are trying to kill you.”

“You still want to kill me, Imogen?” She shrugged. “Well, at least I don’t do HYDRA’s dirty work without knowing why,” he shot back casually.

“Actually, you’ve been doing it for years, idiot,” she said. “Everything SHIELD is HYDRA, remember? You’ve been working for them all this time, you just didn’t know it.”

His jaw locked, grip on his mug tightened. “I think we’re done here,” he ground out, drinking the last of his coffee in one go and digging a twenty dollar bill out of his pocket to pay for it. “Thanks for bringing my stuff. I really like this bow. Was sad to lose it.”

She let him leave without another word.

For the next ten minutes, she sat and wondered why she’d even come to Spokane if all she was going to do was alienate the person she’d been chasing. She was never going to ask him outright for help escaping HYDRA – she could never let go of her pride long enough to get the words out – but she could have kept her mouth shut about the whole SHIELD thing. It was pretty obvious he didn’t want to think about it.

As the rain began to ease off outside, she realised she should probably go. HYDRA would no doubt be on her heels, and now that Barton had broken her window, she’d have to find another car to skip town in. With one more look down into her untouched coffee, she sighed and stood, pulled her damp coat closed in anticipation of the cold air outside.

Across the room, moments after she did, the only other patron of the café stood as well, reaching for the napkins on another table to clean up his spilt coffee. She threw a quick glance in his direction and he almost caught her eye in return. At seeing his face, a shiver ran down her spine.

Shaking it off, Imogen turned and hurried out of the store.

The cold wind hit her before she even closed the door, ripping straight through her shirt and jacket to sink its teeth into the skin below, sucking the warmth from her body. Rain splashed into her face, thrown by the wind before she could draw up her hood, and puddles soaked her shoes in minutes as she splashed through them on her way down the street. She was cold to the bone before she reached the end of the block, not dressed for the weather (she’d opted for light and flexible over warm when deciding what to take with her from Will’s base).

Just four more shopfronts lay between her and an alley she’d noticed earlier that led to another parking lot, one that was more out of the way and less likely to have eyes watching for people stealing cars. She was so fixed on reaching the relative shelter of the alleyway that she almost didn’t notice the man behind her; if he hadn’t run across the road to escape the rain just moments after she had crossed, she wouldn’t have seen him at all.

Slowing and turning her head in the pretense of looking in one of the shop windows, she strained to catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. When she did, her breath caught in her throat. The cigarette man from the café was only ten or so metres away and making no efforts to pretend he wasn’t following her. Facing forward again, her pace increased.

She’d intended to keep walking down the street, until she found a busier store to lose him in or…something. But as she passed the alley, someone stepped out behind her, and tackled her as she turned – right on her already bruised shoulder, of course – sending her reeling sideways between the buildings and off of the main street as she tried desperately to regain her balance. Arms grabbed at her and feet kicked at her legs in a desperate scramble to bring her to the ground. For a moment, she thought it was the man following her, and that he’d caught up without her noticing, but the smell was missing, as was the body mass. This man was thinner (but still just as strong as his companion) and much cleaner, with bruised knuckles used to hard fighting and steel-capped boots that were currently trying to break her leg or something. Grunting, she twisted free of the grip he’d managed to gain on her arm, lashing out with both fists until he gave her room to move, to get out of his reach and regain her balance.

Almost immediately, he was advancing again, driving her further into the small street with a toothless grin. The cigarette man caught up to them then, coming up beside his friend and blocking any chance of exit. She glanced down the street, trying to think through her options, but there were two more waiting at the other end. No escape.

The first man lunged forward, sweeping at her feet. Imogen jumped it, blocked his left fist, ducked under another. She delivered a swift upper-cut as she straightened, with all the power of her body behind it, and his head snapped back painfully. The cigarette man appeared as he stumbled backwards, getting much too close for comfort and filling her lungs with his stink. He buried his knee in her stomach, driving all the air from her body, then gave her a shove and a trip, sending her falling backwards.

Her head cracked painfully against the pavement, sending stars dancing across her vision and a wave of pain rolling through her body just as all the air left her lungs. Trying desperately to suck in a breath, her heart beating way too fast as her whole body went into overdrive, she forced herself to roll over onto her hands and knees, trying to get back on her feet. In the back of her mind, she found the time to wonder if Clint was still around to notice the fighting, or if he’d finally given up and left her to her fate. A boot buried itself in her stomach as she choked on her own breath, throwing her sideways and pushing all thoughts of the archer from her head. As she fell on her back again, the gun hiding in her waistband dug into the small of her back, reminding her that it was there. She rolled again, pulled it out, aimed in the direction of her attackers, and pulled the trigger.

The cigarette man let out a strangled cry as the shot echoed and went down, clutching at his leg. Crimson began to drop from the hole the bullet had ripped in his pants, staining the grey material an even darker colour. The other one, the one she’d given a solid blow to the jaw rallied, leaping and grabbing at her hand, twisting. She let out a loud cry in protest as a hot, knife-like pain shot through her wrist and the gun fell from her fingers, skittering away. He kept twisting, making the pain worse. She clenched her teeth and refused to scream.

“Stop!” A familiar voice saved her, its owner appearing at the end of the street. Her attacker listened, dropping her wrist and retreating, grabbing the gun as he did. Cradling her arm and breathing in short, hard gasps, she stared at this newcomer, blinking spots from her vision.

There were lines in her brother’s face, like he wasn’t happy, like he didn’t understand. “I told you not to hurt her,” he said to the man who didn’t have a hole in his leg. He sounded…angry?

The oaf just shrugged. “She didn’t stop like you said she would. Had to stop her somehow.”

Will’s focus turned from the idiots to her. “Imogen?” he asked, sounding for all the world like he was talking to a five year old. He’d never talked to her like that before. Or maybe he had. Her mind was so foggy that she couldn’t remember. She didn’t like it when people talked to her like that; did she let him talk to her like that?

Thinking about it hurt, so she stopped thinking, focusing on the one thing that she did remember, the one thing that came clearly to her mind no matter how many times they smashed her head into the pavement. He was a liar. He’d lied to her, all this time. Slowly she reached for the gun she’d dropped, lying abandoned on the pavement just inches from her fingers.

“What are you doing?” Will asked as her fingers wrapped around the weapon. A shadow passed over his face. “Did Barton put you up to this?”

She shook her head, searching for her tongue. “No one put me up to anything,” she said slowly. “I make my own decisions.”

“You’re delirious,” her brother decided, a pleading note in his voice.

“I’m fine,” she snapped, but she didn’t bring the gun up. Yet.

“Look, I don’t know what Barton did to you,” Will tried. “But we can help you. I won’t let him hurt you, Imogen, I promise.”

“You promise?” she sputtered in disbelief. “You can help?” She had the sudden urge to laugh, but she bit it back. “Like when you helped me after _they_ died by lying to me? When you promised you’d find the people that did it?”

His brow furrowed again. “Mum and Dad? But I-”

“I read the file,” she cut him off. “It wasn’t SHIELD’s enemies. That was all a story you made up to make me feel better. It was HYDRA. It was always HYDRA. You knew that too, didn’t you? But you went and joined them anyway, instead of hunting them down like you said you would, and you dragged me along with you.”

“God, Imogen, I never _promised_ to hunt anyone down! That was just something I said when we were little, to make you feel better! You weren’t even supposed to remember it!”

“Okay, so I thought you meant what you said back then. Whatever.” She stopped to suck in a deep breath and clear her head, glaring daggers at him. “Why didn’t you at least tell me _how_ they died; _why_ they died?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could!” Her voice rose to a shout, though the effort of it made her head pound.

“No, I couldn’t!” His voice matched hers, sending pain shooting through her brain. “You were too young,” he continued in a quieter voice, taking a deep breath. “You wouldn’t have understood.”

“I’m twenty one now, Will. I think I’m old enough to know the truth.”

“I know, I know,” he huffed over her, stopping her. “It just never came up.” His eyes ran over her, assessing every inch of her. “Look, you’re tired, and hurt, and probably concussed,” he pleaded with her. “Just come with me and we can talk about this when you’re in a better state of mind."

“We’re talking about it now,” she replied stubbornly, making him sigh and pinch the bridge of his nose.

“Why does it even matter?” he asked. “They’re dead. The details aren’t going to change that.”

“Oh, I don’t know, because we _joined_ the people that killed them?” she said pointedly. How did he not get it? “Because they’re our _parents_?”

“You didn’t even know them-”

“I watched them die!” she all but screamed at him. Silence fell over the street; her, standing, panting, alone, the five HYDRA agents staring at her. She could feel their eyes burning into her skin, marking her, branding her. She’d never be able to wash away their scrutiny, she felt in that moment, though the thought didn’t bother her like it usually would. All she wanted right now was the chance to lie down and let the throbbing in her head calm and dissipate, let her wrist fall prone somewhere where stabbing pains couldn’t run up and down her arm when she moved.

Imogen was so distracted by pain and anger, she almost missed a seventh member joining their party behind her. She turned in time to see Barton disarming the man with a bullet in his leg almost casually, and then turn to whack the skinnier one square across the face with one end of his bow. The resulting scrap between them was quick and fierce, and ended in a very large man from the other end of the alley pushing past her to grab the archer from behind, wrestling the bow from his hands and catching him in a headlock with practiced ease.

The bow fell to the ground and bounced, landing right next to her feet. A second later, it was fit comfortably in her hand.

“Barton.” Will spat the word out like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

“I’m guessing this is your brother?” Clint directed at her casually, despite his current position, eyeing Will.

“What are you doing here?” Imogen shot back.

“Even better; what did you do to my sister?” Will added behind her. The big man with his arms wrapped around Clint’s head began to squeeze.

“Last chance, kid,” Clint choked out, face slowly turning red.

Imogen looked at him, and then the bow in her hand, and then her brother. She swallowed hard.

“Tell me,” she said. “Did they leave you anything? When they died?”

He looked confused, but shook his head anyway. “Nothing. You know that. Why?”

“I really hate liars,” she told him with a scowl. And then she spun on her heel and brought the bow up, using it to club the big man right across the face.

By chance, it caught him square in the eye. Cursing, he let go of Clint and raised his hands to clutch at his face, and he was so big that when he stumbled backwards it was almost like he was moving in slow motion. Clint barely stopped to catch a breath before he ripped the bow from her hands and reached for an arrow, firing it at the one agent that had yet to get involved in the fight, who was standing behind Will. Her brother flinched away from the arrow as it flew past him, flattening himself to the wall with wide eyes.

“Don’t do this, Imogen,” he said pleadingly. “He’s only going to use you to do his dirty work.” Next to her, skinny guy rallied and threw himself at Clint, undaunted by the fate of the Cigarette Guy and the big man.

Her eyes stayed on Will. “Yeah, because no one’s done that before,” she replied icily.

He didn’t answer. Instead, his eyes flicked up above her head, at the same time as Clint paused to shout something at her. She turned – and barely caught a glimpse of the big guy towering over her before something hard and heavy hit the side of her head and everything was gone.


	7. Flight Risk

Warm arms wrapped around her. Lifting. Carrying. Drowning? No, that was just the rain. Footsteps, crunching and splashing.

The arms left, letting cold embrace her. She slumped sideways, they caught her again. Words blurred together, her aching wrist turning cold and heavy. Something slammed. Pain split her head open.

The quiet mutter of machinery waking up lulled her back to sleep.

 ----------

Sunlight reached for her, burning at her eyes, turning all her dreams red and asking her to wake. She chanced a look, but the world was too bright, so she turned away and buried her head into the cushion behind her, falling again.

 ----------

Silence.

No, not silence. There was the wind, pushing against the window in wild gusts, twisting the trees across the way. There was the sound of traffic rumbling on past, somewhere behind her. There was her breathing, just barely a whisper as she pulled each breath in and out.

There was her heart, trying to climb its way out of her chest as it realised she was waking.

She had a crick in her neck, an ache that nagged at her until finally she shifted and relieved it. Her head ached, centered on the right side. No shifting would relieve it. In fact, as she moved it flared, like knives poking at her brain, and then settled into a dull ache again. She stopped moving.

Her eyes drifted open, slowly, slowly. There was no sun to burn at them this time, if that really had happened; the world was overcast and filled with the long shadows of a late afternoon. She was in a car, parked outside of a…convenience store? She turned her head as far as she dared, looking down the street each way. There was nothing familiar about this place at all. How had she gotten here? How had she forgotten?

Imogen frowned in confusion, trying to remember. A café. She’d been there with Clint, in the rain, and then…Will had shown up? Her head pounded. The rest was a blur. Had she been fighting? She’d probably been fighting. Headaches were usually a result of fighting.

But now she was here, and it wasn’t raining. She’d never seen a fight end like this. Even if she’d been knocked out, she’d always wake in the same place she’d fallen, or (god forbid) a hospital bed. Not in a strange car, in a strange place, for no immediately apparent reason.

She shifted in her seat, trying to find a more comfortable position. Something tugged at her wrist, sending white-hot pain shooting up her arm, and she froze. Well, she could remember _that_ part all too clearly now. Chancing a look down, she winced at the swelling, and the handcuff pressing against it. The other end of the cuffs was fastened securely to the door handle – to stop her escaping, she supposed.

Now she _really_ wanted to know what was going on.

Whoever had been driving this car would be back soon, her mind registered, throwing years of training at her like it would help. Out, it told her. She had to get out, get away. Assess the situation. Her eyes went to the glove box in front of her – with her good, free arm, she opened it, searching for something she could use to pick the lock on the cuffs or as a weapon against this other person, but there was nothing in there but the car manual and a few miscellaneous bits of paper. The console compartment was the same. She shoved them both closed and leaned back with a huff, resigning herself to her fate. This person was smart enough to keep anything dangerous out of reach, obviously.

The doors to the convenience store (or whatever kind of shop it was; she didn’t care for the specifics) opened, catching her eye. She recognised the man as soon as he walked out. Clint. Of course. She found herself relaxing at the sight of him, like he was no big threat at all (he could kill her in a split second if he wanted to, but apparently she hadn’t quite digested that piece of information). She should have guessed it really, would have guessed it if her head didn’t feel like it was tearing itself apart from the inside out. Half-baked kidnappings weren’t really HYDRA’s style – if it were them, she’d wake up in a cell, or not at all. They were Clint Barton’s style though, without doubt.

“Hey kid,” Clint greeted her as he climbed into the car, throwing a shopping bag into her lap.

“Not a kid,” Imogen mumbled back automatically, opening the bag with one hand and peeing inside. Clothing, mainly, maybe some food underneath it all. Most importantly, a box of aspirin and a bottle of water. She grabbed those immediately, shoving the rest of it off her lap and down to the floor by her feet.

“Knew you’d need those,” he said smugly, pulling out of the car park and grinning as she downed two tablets in quick succession.

“What the hell happened?” she asked, capping the bottle and dropping it down with the rest of the stuff. “And why am I handcuffed inside a car with you?”

“Well I wasn’t going to leave you to die, was I?” He sounded way too upbeat for her liking. “Not after I went to all the trouble of not killing you in the first place.” Imogen almost wished he _would_ kill her, if only to spare her all this confusion.

“Will wouldn’t have killed me,” she argued half-heartedly.

“Maybe not, but someone else would have,” Clint replied. “You’re a flight risk. Which is also why you’re handcuffed to the car, by the way. Didn’t want you wandering off before we could talk.”

“Great,” she muttered, leaning back and staring down the long highway ahead of them, following it far into the distance. “How’d you get away from them?”

He shrugged. “Put a few arrows in people and they usually decide to leave you alone.”

“You put one in Will?”

“Shot him in the shoulder,” Clint confirmed with a nod. “Didn’t think you’d be very happy if I killed him.” She nodded in turn. Though she wouldn’t openly admit it, she felt a rush of pleasure at the idea of Will with an arrow through his arm. He deserved it, after everything that had happened, after the web of lies he’d tangled her up in. Maybe it would keep him off her trail for a few days too; yes, that’d be nice. She needed room to breathe, to untangle the web, before she faced him again.

The fight came to mind again, in pieces that she could barely put together. She remembered the alley they’d been fighting in, and her head hitting the ground, and the comfortable weight of Clint’s bow in her hand (but when had she gotten it from him? She couldn’t remember), and…Will. She’d argued with her brother about their parents, about HYDRA. That much, she knew.

Was she right, to denounce HYDRA and her family over this one thing? For a moment, gnawing anxiety crept into her gut, twisting cold fingers of fear around her heart, but she squished it like a bug, watching it crawl away back into its dark corner. Worrying would do nothing for her. She could take back words, but actions were final and definite; there was no way to pretend she hadn’t handed over that bow.

Clint was right. Someone would have killed her after that. She had made herself a risk now, one that HYDRA could not afford to take. She was worth nothing but the bullet they’d bury between her eyes.

She was a risk Clint couldn’t afford either, really, but she would address that at some other point. She already knew he’d decided he wasn’t going to kill her, though what he _was_ planning to do with her, she had yet to find out.

“So where are we going?” Imogen sighed, pushing it all out of her mind. Just the act of thinking was making her head hurt.

“Don’t know yet,” he replied, much too upbeat for her liking. She screwed up her nose at his cheer. “Just away from here.”

“You going to let me out of this thing any time soon?” She gestured at the cuff with her free hand.

“Probably not.”

“I’m not going to run away, or rat you out, or anything,” she said sullenly.

“No, but you’ll come up with something equally stupid and get yourself killed.”

“Out of the two of us, you are way more likely to be the one doing something stupid,” she argued.

“What makes you say that?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well for a start, you put yourself right in the middle of six HYDRA agents, without weapons or a proper plan.”

He thought about it for a moment, and then agreed with a reluctant sigh. “I can get myself _out_ of trouble though,” he defended. “ _Your_ escape plan was just to argue with them while they beat you up.”

“I would have beat them up too,” she replied haughtily.

“With your form? I doubt it. What do they teach kids at the Academy these days?”

“Better stuff than they taught you.”

He laughed at her. “Never went to SHIELD’s fancy Academy,” he informed her gleefully. Huffing a sigh, she gave up on arguing with him for now and sunk lower in her seat instead, moving carefully to avoid jostling her bad arm. She’d circle back to it later, when her head was a bit clearer and she could think of a more scathing response than, ‘you suck’.

Reveling in his win, Clint reached over and switched on the radio, tuning into some fresh mix station playing trashy pop music. They kept driving.

 ----------

“Man, he got you _good_.”

Will hissed as Murphy pressed down on the arrow wound in his shoulder, trying to stop the bleeding. “Can you just _stich it up_ already?” he asked, a little more forcefully than he probably should have (but damn manners or anything of the sort; he’d just had an arrowhead dug out of his shoulder, he was entitled to a snap every now and then).

His comms slash medical guy looked alarmed for a minute, then slowly peeled away the wad of material he had in his hand to peer at the wound. “Hey, it’s not like they go over ‘arrow wounds’ in the basic med course,” Murphy pointed out, pressing down again. “Or the medium course, _or_ the advanced, for that matter.”

“It’s the same as getting shot with a bullet, just stitch it up already.”

Murphy rolled his eyes. “Hold this then,” he instructed, leaving Will to press down on the wound and reaching for the medical kit beside him, searching out a needle and thread. “You better not hit me,” he muttered as he prepared. “Last time I stitched up John, he gave me a black eye.”

“I’m not going to hit you,” Will replied through clenched teeth.

Murphy grunted, and pried his hand away from his shoulder, swabbing it with something that made it twice as painful. Will grit his teeth. No wonder John had punched him.

A shadow loomed over the both of them, distracting Will from the pain in his shoulder. He glanced up, and found himself staring straight into the eyes of his commanding officer. Not exactly the person he’d been hoping to see while seated at the back of a van half-dressed in tac gear, while blood slowly trickled down his arm.

The man waved a piece of paper at him. “This report better not be a joke, Haylock,” he said, his gaze unwavering. “If you filed this just because you want your sister back-”

Will shook his head. “You really think I’d do that, Agent Morrell?” he asked.

“Your record is outstanding,” Morrell replied. “Which is why I’m inclined to believe you.” He handed the report back to Will. “You’re in charge of this mission. Find her, bring her back.”

“Yes sir.”

“Oh, and Haylock?” Will looked up again. “I know you used to think she was, but she’s not one of us. Remember that. She’s a threat to HYDRA, and threats must be eliminated.” He swallowed hard, and nodded. Morrell left.

“What was that about?” Murphy asked a moment later, turning to disinfect his hands and grab a clean bandage.

“This,” Will replied, holding out the report for him to read. Not for the first time that day, Murphy’s eyes widened. “You’re on my team for this, right?”

“Of course,” he replied, setting about bandaging. “There’s no way you’ll find her without me.”

“Maybe I don’t need you after all…” Will pretended to consider it.

“Don’t let your pride get away with you,” Murphy advised, and if he pulled the bandage a little too tight, well, that was obviously an accident. “Wouldn’t want to ruin your perfect record.”

“I don’t have a _perfect_ record.”

“‘ _Your record is outstanding’_. You don’t see Morrell singing that kind of praise for anyone else here.”

“Probably because Morrell is a terrible singer.”

“Ha ha,” Murphy said dryly and finished bandaging, snapping the med kit closed. “Shall we get to work then?”

Will touched the bandages on his shoulder, and then reached for his shirt. “Of course,” he replied easily, all business again. “We need to find her _fast_. Before Barton can take her out of range.”

“Any idea what he wants with her?” The techie shoved his medical supplies into a corner and climbed further into the van, waking up a bank of computers.

“Not yet.” Will followed him in, watching the screens blink to life. They were already searching for the two runaways, but had yet to find anything, much to his contempt. “I’ll find out soon enough though.”

Murphy had no doubt of it.


	8. Mistrust

There comes a point where even someone as highly trained as Clint Barton must sleep.

Imogen had lost count of how many towns they’d skirted around, how many long highways they’d followed. Night had come and gone twice (or thereabouts), but somehow, Clint was still driving, only stopping when he was about to run out of fuel. If she felt tired and stiff, despite dozing her way through a good part of the trip, she couldn’t imagine how weary he must be.

“You need to stop,” she said eventually, as the lights of another town came into view, drawing closer and closer.

“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just…just gotta-” A yawn cut him off. Imogen rolled her eyes.

“I _can_ drive, you know,” she said.

He laughed. “I brought you along, sure, but don’t start thinking that means I trust you.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.”

“Well…good. Because I don’t.”

“I’d like to live through the day though.”

“What d’you mean?”

She huffed impatiently. “I _mean_ , you’re going to crash this car and kill us both if you don’t _stop driving_.”

Finally, she saw him take a minute to think about it, eyes fixed to the road and a frown to his face. The lights of the next town were just up ahead, a community of a good size despite being in the middle of nowhere, Arizona. He’d have to find a way around the town soon, if he wanted to avoid it like he had every other place they’d passed.

“Fine,” he relented with a sigh, and missed the turn off to another highway that would take them around the town. Satisfied, she nodded, turned back to the road, and slid lower in her seat, curling up like a cat.

Ten minutes later, he finally pulled into a hotel. She waited patiently as he organised a room, and stealthily moved his bow and a bag full of god-knows-what inside, before he finally came around to her side and freed her from the cuffs that kept her chained inside the car. Aware of his careful gaze on her, she stepped out into a cold, dark morning, the sun just starting to peek over the horizon.

Her eyes drifted towards the motel entrance, towards the numerous escape routes around the place, all open paths to freedom now that she was unbound, but her feet followed Clint, her escapes left untouched.

The room was dark and dank, with a lingering smell of mildew, but it was clean, with fresh linen and sturdy furniture. There was an old radiator in the corner, marking just how old the building was; Clint put the cuffs down on top of it. “Go and have a shower, clean yourself up,” he told her, pointing at the small adjoining bathroom. “I’ll put those back on when you’re done.” She didn’t argue, just took the clothes he threw at her from his bag of mysteries and went, closing the door behind her.

There was a mirror directly opposite, throwing her reflection in her face right as she turned around. For the first time, she realised that she was still covered in dirt and grime from the alley and the long drive, and her hair was balled up into the messiest ponytail she’d ever seen. she hadn’t even bothered thinking about how she looked the last few days, busy with an insistent headache and trying to argue her way out of the handcuffs…and of course, the eternal chase of HYDRA, who had been right on their tails just yesterday morning. Her clothes had suffered an even worse fate – her shirt sported several small tears from the thorny bush she’d crawled under when she left HYDRA, and her jeans were stained with the dirt from the garden and the field she’d fallen in, and that was before you even got into what had happened in Spokane.

She screwed up her nose and turned away from the mirror before she could see any more.

Her whole body melted under the hot water of the shower, muscles that had been stiff and sore since the fight loosening and relaxing for the first time in days, feeling almost normal. There was soap in there, the usual little tube that comes in hotel rooms, and she used all of it, scrubbing herself all over and watching dirt from gardens and ditches and streets wash away in cloudy bubbles.

The clothes turned out to be another matter entirely. Clint apparently had very little fashion sense; the pair of soft black track pants were all well and good, but the bright purple shirt just about hurt to look at…not to mention the loud ‘I Heart Hawkeye’ emblazoned across the front. She assumed it was Clint’s idea of a joke. It wasn’t very funny. He could have done better.

Imogen glanced at her old shirt. Dirty, ripped, and stiff with sweat, it wasn’t the most inviting piece of clothing. A loud sigh escaped her. He could have at least bought her a normal shirt. Reluctantly, she pulled it on and left the bathroom, preparing a speech with which to chew Clint out about his idea of good clothing choice.

The plan didn’t get much further. Barton, it turned out, had _really_ needed that rest – he was stretched out on the bed, fast asleep. Hadn’t even lasted the time it took for her to shower, after all that, she thought with amusement. She glanced at the cuffs, lying forgotten on the radiation. Should she do it herself? The idea wasn’t one of her favourites, and the couch across the room looked much more inviting. Besides, it wasn’t like Clint was waking up any time soon.

The choice was easy, then. She drew the curtains closed, shutting out the morning sun, and then settled down in the couch to wait.

 ----------

It was still morning when Clint began to toss and turn, drawing her attention. At first, it was just the occasional twitch, disturbing her from her own attempts to fall asleep, a muttered word here and there that she had no hope of making out. His distress built as the morning wore on, movement becoming more violent, incoherent mumbling growing louder. For a while, she just sat and watched, not sure what to do – as he grew more frantic though, it became increasingly apparent that she’d have to do _something_ , if only to keep anyone from coming to see what was going on.

Were you supposed to wake people who were caught in a nightmare? She had a feeling she’d read something once that said no, waking him would be dangerous (and not just for her, what with the weapon that was undoubtedly hidden under his pillow) – but she also saw no other solution to the problem.

He’d better not kill her, she thought. She hadn’t come all this way just to end up dead.

Standing behind him, she reached out and gave him a solid shove, then ducked for cover. He shot up, wide-eyed and breathing heavily, a gun pointed at the spot where her head had been just seconds before. She peeked out at him from over the mattress, having dropped to a crouch next to the bed, waiting for a sign that it was safe to stand again.

Only once he had run his eyes over the entire room did he slowly lower the gun and regain control of his breathing. She stood and then perched on the end of the bed, staring at the floral curtains Clint had nearly put a bullet through. In the corner of her eye, she saw him glance between her and the cuffs several times. “Didn’t I, uh…” He gestured uselessly, but she got what he was trying to say and shook her head.

“You fell asleep,” she told him bluntly.

“Right.” Silence. “Why’d you wake me up?”

Imogen shrugged. “You were moving around a lot, and muttering. Figured I should wake you up before someone next door complained or something.”

“Right.”

“Nightmares?” she asked casually. He eyed her suspiciously, and didn’t answer. She rolled her eyes. “Obviously nightmares.”

“Everyone has nightmares,” Clint replied defensively.

“Not me,” she replied. He raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Never done anything worth having a nightmare about.”

“Right.” It wasn’t hard to tell that he didn’t believe her. “Stay here,” he instructed unnecessarily, standing and stumbling into the bathroom. Rolling her eyes once more, she returned to the couch.

 ----------

They didn’t speak another word to each other until they were back on the road again, Clint with his second cup of coffee in hand. “Nice shirt,” he commented as he turned onto the highway.

Imogen was instantly annoyed again. “I hate you,” she told him in no uncertain terms, glancing down at the offending item of clothing.

“A lot of people say that,” he informed her cheerfully.

“I’m not surprised. No one likes a guy who buys his own shirt.”

He glanced at the ‘I Heart Hawkeye’ on her shirt again, looking amused. “I thought it might inspire you.”

“To do what?”

“Not threaten to kill me.”

“Are you ever going to get over that?”

“Are you handcuffed to the door?”

She glanced down at her arm (now free), and sullenly accepted his point. “Are you going to let me drive so you can sleep?” she asked instead.

He shook his head. “I got plenty of sleep.”

“You got like, four hours. If that.”

“Four hours is plenty.”

“You know you’re not superhuman, right?” She fixed him with a look of contempt as she said it, making him shift uncomfortably.

“Says who?” he shot back, pretending to be unfazed. “I am a _superhero_ you know.”

“A regular one. You’re the most regular superhero there is.”

“And you’re really mean.”

“No.” She dropped her gaze, looking down at her hands instead, folded neatly in her lap. “I’m just honest. It’s not my fault if what’s true hurts.”

Clint reached up to rub the back of his neck, and then grabbed at his coffee again. “Dunno kid. Still think you might just be mean.”

“Think what you want,” Imogen replied with a shrug. “Everyone else does. And I’m not a kid.” Without giving him a chance to reply, she reached out and turned the radio on, flicking it to the first station that she could find. He got the point, and left it alone, letting unfamiliar music filter through the dusty speakers and fill up the car as they drove on.

 ----------

Sleep didn’t come to either that day, just hours of staring down road after road. Clint didn’t need any prompting to turn into a motel as dusk drew on, much to Imogen’s satisfaction. This one wasn’t much better than the last place they’d visited – small and cheap, but clean at least, just a bed and a bathroom and not much else (there was a TV here at least, almost making up for the armchair she’d have to curl up in).

It was a warm night, despite the intermittent breeze that picked up every now and then to provide a few seconds of sweet relief before the heat pressed in again. There was no air conditioner, so they threw the window wide open to catch what wind there was, snipers across the way be damned. Clint claimed the bed, leaving her with the armchair, as she’d expected. For a couple hours, she curled up there and tried to sleep, but dangerous things came swirling through her head, keeping her awake, thoughts she hadn’t entertained in days. She’d been deliberately keeping herself busy with other things, focusing in on the concussion that had disappeared in the last day or so and driving far, far away from all her troubles.

HYDRA. Item 548. Her parents. Will.

Lies and liars. All of them. She hated liars.

She couldn’t fall asleep while she was thinking about it. Throwing off any impressions of sleep, she stood and padded quietly across the room, footsteps muffled by the carpet, easing the door open just enough for her to slip through, closing it just as carefully.

She glanced back through the window. Clint still appeared to be sleeping. Nodding to herself, she buried her hands in her pockets and wandered away towards the motel entrance. The pavement was warm beneath her bare feet, just cool enough not to burn them, the stone holding desperately onto the warmth of the sun that had beat down on it all day. She stopped at the entrance, considering the quiet road beyond, but still she felt no urge to run. What would be the point anyway? Clint would find her, or HYDRA would find her, or she’d just get settled in some kind of life and everything would catch up to her. Running away never worked; once you started, you couldn’t stop. Things always caught up to you in the end.

Imogen wasn’t the running away type anyway. That was half her trouble – she never backed down or turned away (the other half of her trouble was her brutal honesty, probably. People didn’t like seeing the truth).

Turning away from the road, she circled around the long row of motel rooms and parked cars to the back of the building. Everything was more scattered here; there was what looked like a laundromat, still awake even in the middle of the night, a dark barbeque area, and a playground. Down the back and surrounded by a fence was a pool, the whole area illuminated by the soft glow of underwater lights. She drifted towards it, soon finding herself sitting cross-legged at the very edge of the pool, staring down into its depths.

Clint found her there too. She heard his light footsteps, heard him open and close the gate. “Thought you were asleep,” she said casually as his feet stopped beside her, clad as every in a pair of heavy black combat boots.

“Woke up when you left,” his voice replied from somewhere above her. Grunting, she turned her attention back to the pool. “What are you doing out here anyway?”

She shrugged, pulling her jacket closer around her. “Couldn’t sleep,” she admitted in an unusually quiet voice.

“So you decided to hang out by the pool?”

“You got any better ideas?” she snapped back.

“Well,” he drawled lazily. “There’s a nice playground back there…” She didn’t even deign to answer. Eventually, he sighed and lowered himself down to the pavers as well, a careful distance from the water.

“Any idea where you’re driving to yet?” she asked, just to break the silence.

“Maybe,” he replied, trying his best to be mysterious.

“So no, not really then,” she said with a roll of her eyes.

Clint almost looked offended. “I know where I’m going!”

“But you’re not going to tell me.”

“Nope.” His voice was smug, just like his face when she glanced at him. Rolling her eyes once more, she returned her gaze to the water. Silence fell over them both, reclaiming the warm night – in the absence of the wind, nothing moved, the world dark and still and quiet under the watchful eye of the moon.

Imogen didn’t like it, didn’t trust the quiet. All too often, silence came before action, before an attack, before danger. “Clint?” she asked, just to break it. He hummed in reply. “What would you do? If you weren’t a SHIELD agent? If you left right now?”

He paused, deep in thought. “I dunno,” he replied. “Teach archery maybe. Or be a farmer.”

“A farmer?”

“Yeah.” He was nodding along now, growing more enthusiastic about the idea by the second. “With like, cows and chickens and stuff.”

“Why?” Wrinkling her nose, she tried to imagine being a farmer. It wasn’t an appealing idea to her – she’d never been a fan of animals, farm or otherwise.

Clint shrugged. “Nice and peaceful out in the country, miles from anywhere.” A wicked grin dawned. “No crazy kids coming to kill me.”

“Not a kid,” she reminded him, but she smiled anyway.

“Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day I’ll believe you.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

He ignored her. “So _kid_ ,” he said. “What would _you_ do?”

Imogen froze. She’d never been anything but an agent for HYDRA – Will had gotten her into training almost the moment she’d dropped out of school when she was fifteen. She’d thought, at the time, it was because he wanted them to stay together, or to rescue her from Cassandra Brady’s warped impression of parenting, but now she was beginning to wonder if it was just so that he could get out of looking after her early.

“I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “Go and study something, I guess? That’s what people do, isn’t it?” She laughed. “End up in jail probably.”

Wordlessly, Clint stood and offered her a hand up, which she took, and they walked back to the room in silence. Imogen felt only a little better since she’d come out – she still had questions about her brother and their past, and until she found the answers they would continue to torment her.

There was a buzzing noise when they got back, coming from Clint’s bag. Imogen had thought it was just weapons and questionably obtained cash, but now, as he rifled through its contents and produced her phone (which she’d been sure she’d lost), it became apparent that there was a whole lot more secreted away in there.

She forgot about the rest as soon as she saw the phone though. “Why do you have that?” she demanded, storming across the room to stand face-to-face with him.

Alarmed, his eyes widened, his first instinct to raise the phone above his head to where she couldn’t reach it. “How does this thing even have battery still?” he asked, backing away from her and looking up at the screen.

“It’s a Starkphone,” she snapped, stalking after him. “They can run for a week between charges.”

“Your brother’s calling,” Clint hit the wall with a grunt, eyes still turned upwards. “Why’s he calling?” The buzzing stopped, the call unanswered. Clint’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s a lot of calls.”

She stood in front of him, arms crossed. “Maybe you should answer him,” she said impetuously. “See what he wants.”

“No way.” His eyes finally tore away from the phone above his head. “Phone call from the enemy? _Obviously_ a trap. Are you stupid?”

“I’m not stupid,” she argued. “Give me my phone back.”

“No.” Before she could as much as blink, he whipped the phone down and into his pocket. “Stay. Away.” He poked her hard twice in the shoulder, making her flinch away, rubbing her shoulder. Taking his chance, he slipped past her and collapsed on the bed, closing his eyes and feigning sleep.


	9. Chasing Birds

“She’s not picking up.”

“I know Murphy.”

The techie tapped a few keys on his keyboard. “I can’t get a fix on her if she doesn’t pick up.”

“I _know._ ” He pressed the call button again.

“How do we even know she still has her phone?”

“Barton has it,” Will said. “Picked it up when he took her.”

“Why?”

“I don’t _know_ Murphy.” His voice was long-suffering now. “Why does that crazy archer do anything?”

Murphy just gave him a look, and then turned back to his screen. The phone rang out.

From the front of the van came an impatient sigh. Keely’s face appeared between the curtains that separated back from front, eyeing them both. “Do you have anything yet?” she asked. Murphy shook his head and she ran a hand through her short black hair. “I need a smoke,” she declared, disappearing again.

“You’re not supposed to do that in the field,” Will called half-heartedly.

“Give me something to do and I’ll stop,” came her reply, just before she slammed the door closed. He didn’t move; there was no real point in stopping her. After all, John wasn’t supposed to be snoring loudly in the front seat either, and if he stopped Keely from smoking, he’d have to wake John up – and no one wanted that. John wasn’t the sort of person you snuck up on if you valued your health and wellbeing.

He called Imogen again.

“How do you know she’ll even pick up?” Murphy asked. “You’re not exactly the number one person she’s going to want to talk to right now.”

“She’ll pick up.” His voice left no room for doubt. “I know my sister. She’ll pick up.”

“You sure sound confident about that.”

Will shrugged. “She thinks she’s been lied to. She’ll want to yell at someone for it, and I doubt Barton’s going to be willing to sit around and listen to her.”

“I always thought she was a pretty good kid. But now…” Murphy leant back in his chair, swinging from side to side. He’d met her once or twice, he recalled, when she’d been around to see Will or the team had been stationed at the same base as her. Then, he’d thought she was nice enough, if a little rough around the edges. And anyway, from what he’d heard, she had reason enough to be. It didn’t really bother him all that much. Now she was a fugitive, an enemy of HYDRA. He was having a hard time reconciling that description with the small blonde he remembered.

Will laughed. “She was never a _good_ kid,” he corrected Murphy. “I kept her out of trouble. I thought she’d stop being so pigheaded if she started training with SHIELD, but…”

Murphy could see his thoughts written all over his face, and paused in his endless searching. “It’s not your fault, you know,” he told Will. “It was her choice to betray everyone and go find Barton.”

“Maybe you’re right,” the other man sighed. Nodding to himself, Murphy turned back to his computers.

The phone stopped mid-ring.

 ----------

Clint turned down the radio.

Imogen glanced at him, slouched in the passenger seat inspecting the fletching of an arrow, his feet settled on the dash, and looked back to the road, trying to ignore the sudden quiet. “Why’d you join HYDRA?” he asked finally.

Her grip on the steering wheel tightened. “Why’d you join SHIELD?” she shot back, automatically shifting to defensive.

In the corner of her eye, she could see him give her a strange look. “Because I could do a lot more good with SHIELD than I was before I joined.”

“What were you doing before SHIELD?”

There was a long pause, and then, “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me?”

“Only if you go first.”

Another sigh, and then a shrug. The arrow in his hands rolled back and forth between his fingers. “I was working as an assassin; you know, hired to kill and all that. Made a name for myself.” He held up the arrow and let out a humourless laugh, sobering quickly. “Pretty easy when you use a unique weapon. Anyway, I was camped out on a rooftop in the middle of the night somewhere in Brazil, waiting for this one drug lord to come into sight, when I see these guys in heavy combat gear lurking around. I’d been scoping this place out for days and I knew they weren’t supposed to be there, so I get down off the roof and leg it. Thought I’d given them the slip, and then this one guy in a _suit_ starts chasing me, and he’s _good._ Kept following and following, and I couldn’t shake him off.”

“What’d you do?” she asked, when he descended into silence, staring at the arrow.

Clint smiled faintly, but there was a hollow, haunted look in his eyes now, a slight shake to his hands that she put down to a trick of the light. “He caught up to me when I turned into a dead end, and then tripped on a tree root and busted my ankle. There I am, limping around, and this guy in a suit appears and says, ‘Clint Barton? I’d like to talk to you about conviction’.”

“Conviction?” She frowned at the term.

Clint nodded. “Yeah, conviction. Coulson was pretty big on the idea.”

“Sounds stupid to me.”

He laughed. “Me too. Convinced me to join SHIELD though.”

“So you joined because someone gave you a speech about loyalty?”

“I joined because it was better than just killing for money. Because it was a job that let me sleep at night.”

“Until HYDRA came about,” she added.

Clint nodded. “So?”

“So what?”

“Why’d you join HYDRA?”

“Because Will did,” she said slowly. “When I was fifteen, our stepmother sort of…disappeared. And then I got kicked out of school. He used HYDRA connections in the Academy to get me a place there.”

“So you don’t actually believe in all their ‘world domination’ crap.”

Imogen shrugged. “It’s never really mattered what I believe until now. There’s not much world domination in training.”

Clint nodded slowly. “Why did your brother join, then?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “Our parents were HYDRA, and they filled him up with all their propaganda before they died. All he’s ever wanted is to be an agent of HYDRA.”

“They didn’t do it to you?”

She waved him off casually. “Probably. I don’t remember them like he does. He’s eight years older than me.”

“Do you remember them dying?”

She glanced at him sharply, then glued her eyes to the road. “What?” she asked, before remembering what she’d been saying to Will moments before Clint showed up in that street a few days ago. _I watched them die!_ He must have heard her then.

Clint was still looking at her, waiting; she could see him in the corner of her eye, however hard she tried not to. Imogen swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in her throat.

“Yeah,” she admitted finally. “I remember that. I mean-” Reaching up, she pulled the neck of her shirt down low enough to reveal her collarbone, and the long, jagged scar she usually kept covered that ran above it. “-they left me enough of a reminder.” She let the shirt go, covering it again. “I was five. They tried to slit my throat,” she continued, just to fill the silence. “I got lucky.”

“Sorry, kid.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she cut back abruptly, uncomfortable with anything approaching sympathy. Clint took the hint, and didn’t say anything more.

A gas station came into view ahead, a tall sign loudly telling anyone who passed by about the newly opened McDonalds there. “You hungry?” he asked suddenly.

“Really?” she asked, not impressed.

“They have good coffee.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous about coffee?”

“It’s the middle of the day.”

He sighed. “Just pull over.”

She did as he said, then sat and waited while he refueled. “You want anything?” he asked through the window.

“No thanks,” she replied, curling her lip. “I only eat here when I’m desperate.” He shrugged and wandered off.

There was a faint buzzing noise coming from the back seat, only audible now that the engine was silent. Her phone again…and again, and again. Groaning, she tried to ignore it, but it was like a bug you couldn’t quite pin down, making just enough noise to annoy you.

Four calls in and she was over it. Why had she made her own phone so annoying? Twisting around, she reached for Clint’s bag and rummaged through it – _why_ did he have so much stuff – almost cutting herself on a loose arrowhead as she retrieved the phone. The call rang out as she slumped back down in her seat, letting her unlock and scroll through her messages. They were all from Will, of course, the latest sent the night before.

_Imogen, call me back._

_I know you have your phone._

_Just talk to me?_

_Thought we were supposed to be family._

_After everything I’ve done for you, you can’t even give me one call?_

_I should have-_

Another call came through, and without thinking about it she punched the reject button. “Damn it,” she muttered to herself a moment later, when she realised that he’d now know she was paying attention. Her phone returned to the messages, just as a new one came through and scrolled her back down to the bottom.

 _Hi Imogen,_ it read. And then, _we need to talk._

She hesitated, and almost threw it out the window, but stopped herself at the last second.

 _About what?_ she typed out instead.

He replied almost instantly. _Mum and Dad. And you._

_And if I don’t care anymore?_

_What about Item 548? I know you read the report._

548\. It had almost slipped her mind, with everything that was happening. She’d been much more focused on the memo that had confirmed her parents were killed by the same people they’d spent their lives working for; the same people _she_ had been working for. She wanted answers, for all of it, and there was only one person she could think of that had them.

She called him.

He answered on the first ring. “Hey Immy.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ve been lying to me and I’m angry with you.”

She heard him sigh and felt a grim satisfaction at the sound. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to keep this stuff from you.”

“Yeah, whatever. What do you want?”

“Why are you doing this?” He sounded pained.

She had an answer for him this time. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe because HYDRA killed our parents and then sent me out to be killed too?”

“That mission was a mistake, Imogen. No one wanted you to die.”

“Yeah? And what about Mum and Dad?”

“They were traitors. Mum tried to sabotage the Soldier program, was working on something that would have crippled HYDRA for good. Dad wanted out, wanted to sell everything he knew to the highest bidder.”

“Good.”

“Good? HYDRA is trying to build a better world, and it’s people like them that tear it all apart.”

“HYDRA were going to kill millions of people. I’ve seen the news. You can’t just kill people for standing up for what they believe in.”

“I thought you understood what-“

“What HYDRA believe in? I do!” She smacked her fist into the seat, pushing down against the cushion. “I just don’t agree with it anymore.”

“So what, you’re just going to throw it all away? You’d rather be hunted the rest of your life?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was hard as steel. “But I know I don’t want to be used to kill people who haven’t done anything, like you. Or be thrown away to die, like HYDRA already tried to do.”

“And how do you know your new friend is any different?”

“I know.”

“Do you?” He barked out a laugh at her. “You don’t know it, Imogen, but you’ve always been a puppet and a project, for one person after another. And you always will be.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” she asked, gritting her teeth. Clint appeared outside the gas station, coffee in hand. She should hang up now, before he saw her, but she hadn’t even gotten any answers yet, and she _needed_ to know.

“See, I told you you’d want to know. I’m talking about-” A hand grabbed her wrist, pulling the phone away from her ear and then out of her grip entirely, cancelling the call.

“Call from the enemy. Trap,” Clint said, his voice dark. “Didn’t we talk about this?” She shrugged. “I’m driving, by the way. Get out.”

Wordlessly, Imogen slid out of the driver’s seat and rounded the car, climbing back in on the other side. Clint barely gave her time to shut the door before he drove off, going faster than was probably legally allowed (not that she was going to question it).

His quiet disapproval bothered her. Usually, she didn’t care if other people thought badly of her, but when it was clear that Clint didn’t approve? Well, _now_ she cared. It annoyed her too – she didn’t want to care what he thought. Why would she? It made no sense.

“Sorry,” she muttered eventually, if only to put her own mind to rest.

Clint nodded, just once. “What did he say?” he asked.

“Something about our parents being traitors.” She shrugged, as if it were no big deal.

“That’s it?”

Imogen hesitated. “He said I was a puppet,” she added finally. “And a lost cause.”

Clint gave her a smile. “That’s alright,” he said. “I was both those things too.”


	10. Five Four Eight

458 was bugging her now.

She’d forgotten about it before, in the wake of other, more important discoveries. It hadn’t really seemed like anything, maybe just a memento or something he’d kept just for himself (he’d actually _known_ their parents, unlike her). But now that Will had mentioned it she couldn’t stop wondering what it was, and _why_ it was so important that he’d never mentioned it to her.

She turned down the radio.

Clint’s attention snapped to her instantly. It had become their ritual over the days – the radio began and ended all conversations, had plenty to say when they had run themselves dry. Both were loners by nature, neither especially talkative nor friendly for any long period of time, and certainly not used to being trapped in the close confines of a car together for days and days. There just wasn’t enough to talk about to fill all those hours, so the radio filled it for them – sometimes with music, sometimes just with talk about nothing in particular.

“Have you ever heard of Item 548?” she asked.

Clint took a moment to think about it, and then shook his head. “Don’t think so. Why?”

“It was in a report that I read, about Will. Didn’t think it was _that_ important, but he mentioned it earlier.”

“Well, I’ve got nothing. Sorry kid.”

“Not a kid.” That made him smile.

 ----------

Another long drive later, Clint found an actual hotel, one with multiple stories and fancy rooms that were more like small apartments than hotel suites. He wasn’t happy with it (he liked motels that were full of anonymous truck drivers and backpackers, Imogen had learnt – easier to be forgotten there). There weren’t any places like that in this town though, or at least not from what they had seen of it. At 2am, Imogen refused to look any further when they had already found a perfectly acceptable place. “Pull in there, or find a comfortable abandoned building or something,” she told him eventually, in no uncertain terms.

In her opinion, the best part of the hotel was the two bedrooms, meaning she wouldn’t have to sleep on a lumpy old couch again. It was absolute heaven to stretch out on a bed for the first time in…a week? At least a week by now, surely. Clint just shrugged when she asked him, still unhappily focused on the balcony. He didn’t want to be on the third floor. She was beyond caring, weary of the endless travel and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements of the past.

For a little while, she flicked through TV channels, ignoring Clint’s endless muttering about Dog Cops (which wasn’t even a good show anyway, so who knew why Barton was getting so worked up about it). Eventually, having proved there was absolutely nothing good on at 2 in the morning, she threw the remote at him, almost nailing him right in the forehead, and retreated to bed, dropping off to sleep almost immediately.

Shadows chased each other through her sleep and stunted dreams, just vague figures silhouetted every now and then by flickered lights, never substantial enough to really catch her attention. She floated in the middle of it all, calm despite the strangeness of the almost-dreaming.

A solid thud echoing up the hall outside pilled her from the shadows, melting them away into the back of her mind for her to forget about. Blearily, she sat up and pushed messy curls out of her eyes, glancing at the clock up on the wall. She could just make out the hands, pointing out something like four thirty.

Groaning, she flopped back down again, rubbing her eyes and wondering why she’d woken. The thudding noise came again, accompanied with the sound of splintering wood, deafening in the still of predawn. She waited a moment, listening for any sign of life from Clint next door. There was nothing. He was a quiet sleeper, as all good agents were. With an exaggerated sigh, she dragged herself out of bed and padded out to Clint’s room. What the hell was going on out there anyway? Was this what usually happened early in the morning in nice hotels?

Clint was fast asleep, just as she’d thought. Quiet aside, he was a heavier sleeper than you’d expect. She threw a boot at him from the doorway, catching him square in the stomach, and he woke with a start, gun in hand as always. He relaxed when he saw her, dropping the weapon onto the bed beside him.

“What the hell,” he mumbled blearily, rubbing at his eyes. His head landed back on his pillow a moment later, as if he expected to go back to sleep again any time soon.

“There’s something going on outside.” Another thud accentuated her words.

Clint moaned. “This is already the worst day ever,” he complained. “And it’s not even five in the morning.”

“Clint, focus. Weird noises in the hallway.”

He blinked at her a few times, and then sat up abruptly at the next thud. “Now that you mention it, that is kind of weird,” he said through a muffled yawn. “Kind of spooky.”

“Right.”

“Probably-“ Another yawn cut him off entirely. “Probably HYDRA.”

“How’d you figure that?”

He stared at her like she was the biggest idiot he’d ever met. “They traced that call you made.”

“Don’t blame this on me,” she said, instantly defensive.

“Well it’s your fault.” He swung out of bed, pulling on his boots.

“Seriously? He was ringing me!”

“And you answered. Shut up, I’m trying to figure out an escape route.”

“We’re on the third floor with HYDRA knocking on the door, where are we going to escape _to_?”

He huffed a sigh as he circled the room. “See, this is why I didn’t want to stop here.”

She rolled her eyes in return. “Don’t even start.”

The lights of the town outside the window drew her eye, shining through the glass doors of the balcony. Well, good thing they had one of those. That would be so _handy_. “Well, if nothing else, we can always throw ourselves off the balcony,” she commented, voice dripping with sarcasm.

Clint followed her gaze, the spark of an idea lighting in his eyes. Before she knew it, he had opened the doors wide and stepped out, slipping out into the shadows to the railing. “I was kidding!” she hissed from the safety of the room, watching with wide eyes as he poked his head out and looked both up and down, assessing something. “Clint-” He was steadfastly ignoring her, returning to the room and passing her by, heading back to the bedroom. The heavy sound of a foot hitting a door came from close by, too close for comfort. They were only one or two doors away now, and not losing any time.

Clint returned with his bow in hand, bag and quiver on his back. He stalked back out onto the balcony, throwing her own boots at her as he passed. “Oh my god,” she near whispered in disbelief, watching him as she pulled on the shoes. “Clint, I am not jumping off this building.”

“We’re not jumping _all_ the way,” he said, peering up again and drawing an arrow. “Come and keep an eye on the idiots down there. Don’t want bullets in my head while I’m trying to do this.”

“But we are jumping?” She swallowed hard and darted out to join him, her heart quickening at the dizzying drop and HYDRA agents below. None of them had thought to look up yet; all eyes were in the front doors of the hotel. For now.

There was a heavy thud right next door, the sound of a door slamming open. Imogen glanced at their own door without really meaning to; it was sturdy and silent, of course, not yet disturbed. She looked back at Clint, who looked completely unconcerned at the impending invasion, and checked on the agents down below again. “Hurry up!” she hissed at him. Grunting in response, he took his shot, the arrow clanging against the railing of the balcony above theirs, and then ducked down, dragging her with him out of sight just as several of the agents on the ground looked upwards at the unexpected noise.

“What are you doing?” she asked as Clint crept forward again.

“Getting us out of here,” he murmured in reply. One strong hand gripped her elbow, pulling her to her feet and shoving her towards the railing. “Climb,” he instructed, doing just that. She followed him over, clinging to the railing like a limpet until he grabbed her arm again, pulling it free. “Hold onto me.” She hesitated, eyes falling towards the ground. There was a thud at the door behind them, a splintering noise that spurred her into action; in the blink of an eye, her hands had left the railing and she was clinging to him instead, trying not to think about just how close to falling she was.

HYDRA charged through the door and Clint leapt. For a moment she thought they were falling but no, the ground had only grown a little closer – they were _swinging_ , down to the next balcony and in. She glanced up, saw a silvery length of something akin to rope reaching from his bow up to the fourth floor balcony, like a human-sized spider web.

“Grappling hook arrow,” he said smugly as he swung into the second floor. One, two, three bullets glanced off the metal railing, leaving it ringing in their ears, more shots zinging past their heads, all fired just a moment too late. Imogen felt her feet touch the ground and stumbled, letting go of Clint as she lost her balance and fell into a roll. The hawk didn’t even land on his feet, just freed his bow and came crashing down, cracking his head on the concrete floor.

With little sympathy, she found her own feet and then hauled him up as well, grabbing his bow as she did. “Alright, nice trick, now get moving,” she told him, and gave him another shove.

“Aw, head,” he muttered as he did as he was told, moving through the room and an already busted front door to an empty hallway beyond. There was a shout from above, a corresponding one from below, and she grit her teeth, trying to think.

“Stairs,” Clint said, recovered enough to pull her along and down. Their steps echoed loudly up and down the spiraling stairwell, but even over the din their own feet made, Imogen could hear at least two others heading down with them. At the bottom of the stairs, Clint paused to jam the heavy door shut as best he could and then directed her to the left, darting down dark and empty halls until they reached a bar of sorts, closed for the night. One whole wall was made of glass; he didn’t hesitate to put a round of bullets through one pane, not even blinking as the whole thing shattered and fell in a million tiny pieces that crunched and cracked under the thick tread of their boots.

They emerged into a cold, moonless night, an empty road stretching left and right. “Now what?” she whispered, stepping out onto the road and looking around.

“Need a car,” Clint muttered in response, his eyes alighting on one parked just a few metres away – not as good as the one they’d been driving a few hours ago, she noticed, but serviceable. “That’ll do.”

There was a click behind them.

There was a click behind them.

Imogen whirled around, almost as quickly as Clint, and found herself staring straight into the cold blue eyes of her brother – eyes that she shared, she remembered suddenly. His gun was pointed at Clint, keeping the bigger threat from drawing any kind of weapon. She realised his bow was still in her hands with a start, her fingers clenched so tight around it that her knuckles had turned white. Her heart leapt into her throat as Clint grew still, hands well away from any of his weapons. “Drop the bow,” Will instructed, glancing at her with the look he always had when he was about to snap. She glanced at the archer next to her who shrugged, and then back at Will, who caught her eye with fierce purpose.

The bow didn’t move.

“Imogen,” Will said through gritted teeth, the way he did when she had done something especially stupid, when he was about at the end of his tether. As always, she faced him with a spark of rebellion in her eyes, in the way she stood, drifting into the air she breathed. “Drop the bow,” he repeated.

“No,” she said, mentally cringing at how child-like the simple refusal sounded.

“Drop it, or I’ll kill him.” He gestured wildly at Clint with the gun, never straying from a killing shot.

“Imogen,” Clint interrupted quietly, just as her mouth opened to hurl some cutting reply that she’d probably regret later. His voice was calmer at steady, calmer than most people would be when staring down the barrel of a gun, their life placed in her hands. It meant he had a plan. Hopefully. A plan he’d need to be alive to execute.

The bow slipped through her fingers and clattered to the ground by her feet, cracking open the quiet that had settled over them. Will smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes, and the gun didn’t drop an inch. There was no relieved sigh, no forgiveness or attempts to heal the rift that had opened between them. This Will was cold and hard and logical, so grown on the lies of HYDRA that he wouldn’t ever be able to see past them, to see the truth. This Will had no siblings to care for; he had HYDRA, and nothing more.

Their fight was between SHIELD and HYDRA now. As it always had been.

“Sorry Imogen,” he directed at her, once he was satisfied that she was unarmed. “But you can’t just leave HYDRA and not expect any retribution.”

“I know that,” she replied. “Didn’t think I’d be worth this much trouble though. How’d you get so much support for a personal mission?”

“It’s not personal,” he snarled, the finger on the trigger of his gun twitching.

“Isn’t it?” She could hear herself getting flustered, anger making her face hot. “What do I know that’s so important that a broken HYDRA can afford to send this kind of force to hunt me down?”

“It’s not what you know.” Another agent came into the restaurant, picking his way through the broken glass to join Will. Murphy, she recognised him as his gun trained on her. He and Will had been friends for a long time, worked together even longer. He’d always been nice to her, even when others hadn’t, but in the end he was just as brainwashed by HYDRA as her brother.

“You think I took something then? Or sabotaged you?” Out of the corner of her eye, Imogen saw Clint’s hand slowly moving towards his belt, unnoticed by their enemies, who had their attention trained solely on her. “Or are you not here for me at all?”

“Oh, we’re here for you,” Will affirmed. “Barton’s a very nice extra, but he’s also someone else’s mission.”

“ _Why_?”

“She doesn’t know,” Murphy observed quietly, pushing his glasses up his nose with one finger.

“No,” her brother confirmed. “She doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t know?” Her eyes flicked from one to the other, a deep scowl lining her face. “Doesn’t know what?”

“We came here for Item 548,” Will said.

“I have no idea what that is, remember?” she spat. “Or why you think I’d have it. You never told me anything about it.”

The two HYDRA agents shared a look. “548,” Murphy said finally. “It’s you.”

Something hard and heavy hit Will in the side of the head, sending him spinning, his gun dropping. Clint sprang forward to disarm him, leaving her with Murphy.

Their eyes met, both frozen in surprise. His hands were shaking. She knew how that felt. For a second, she didn’t move, still working through what he had said; then her training kicked in, screaming at her to duck for cover (not that she actually _had_ any cover, out here in the middle of the street), just before he pulled the trigger. A bullet whizzed over her head as she dropped to the ground, scrambling for the bow that she’d dropped just a few minutes earlier.

Two large steps took her within striking range of Murphy, who was still fumbling with the gun. Face grim, she didn’t hesitate to deliver a swift roundhouse blow to his head with the bow, catching him with full force just behind the ear. He dropped like a stone. Will and Clint were engaged in an all-out fist fight, as she’d expected. She took a moment to kick away the weapons that the two HYDRA agents had dropped, pulling out her own gun.

On the ground, Murphy stirred again, and she put a bullet in his leg – painful and debilitating, but not life-threatening. “You done?” said Clint behind her and she turned. Will was on the ground, gasping for breath and only semi-conscious. She met his eye for a second, and abruptly turned again. Clint looked about as she’d expected, with a split lip and a black eye, and bruises starting to form on his arm and cheekbone. “I was finished five minutes ago,” she snapped back.

Shadows loomed around the corner of the hotel and lights flicked on upstairs. “We need to go,” Clint said unnecessarily. His hand found her wrist as he passed, pulling her along, and then they were running around a corner of their own and into the night.


End file.
